Myth Happens

The pattern of my days has tended toward craptastic, but theseatheseatheopensea has been writing incredible fills for prompts that I left in threesentenceficathon, most recently the one I threw out originally for an episode of TNG I hadn't seen since childhood. The latest pebble rushthatspeaks has brought me from the internet is a black cat Tarot whose particular standout is the Hanged Man. fleurdelis41 sent me Jewish dance cards and ashlyme a suite of Stanley Myers' The Martian Chronicles (1980). spatch introduced me to Beans. I have been re-reading Robin Scott Wilson's Those Who Can: A Science Fiction Reader (1973), the anthology in which Le Guin explains how her brain plotted out the characterization of her novelette "Nine Lives" (1969) without bothering to let her know in advance:

Together with this glimpse of the situation, the character of Owen Pugh presented itself, complete and unquestionable, and indeed, at that very point, pretty enigmatic. Having a character really is very like having a baby, sometimes, except that there's a lot less warning, and babies don't arrive full-grown. But one has the same sense of pleased bewilderment. For instance, why was this man short and thin? Why was he honest, disorderly, nervous, and warmhearted? Why on earth was he Welsh? I had no idea at the time. There he was. And his name was Owen Pugh, to be sure. It was up to me to do right by him. All he offered (just like a baby) was his existence. Any assurance that this highly individualized, peculiar, intransigent person really was somehow related to my theme had to be taken on trust. A writer must trust the unconscious, even when it produces unexpected Welshmen.

I don't think anyone has ever made a Morden-and-the-Shadows vid to the Pack a.d.'s "Cardinal Rule" (2011) and it's a crying shame.

I have not slept in two nights as opposed to brief random hours elsewhere on the clock, but the sunlight this afternoon was gorgeous.

( I'm a little hungover and I may have to steal your soul. )

Like just about the rest of this weekend, any plans I had to attend even part of this year's sci-fi marathon at the Somerville did not survive contact with my stamina. Hestia has now broken four slats out of my blinds for a better view on Bird Theater and having tired herself out chattering at their delicious players sleeps innocently against my mermaid lamp, softly and a little snufflily breathing out a purr.

My poem "The Principle of the Thing" has been accepted by Weird Fiction Quarterly. It is the ghost poem I wrote last spring for Werner Heisenberg: 2025 finally called it out. 2026 hasn't yet rendered it démodé.

Branching off The Perceptual Form of the City (1954–59), I am still tracking down the publications of György Kepes whose debt to Gestalt psychology my mother pegged instantly from his interdisciplinary interests in perception, but my local library system furnished me with Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City (1960) and What Time Is This Place? (1972) and even more than urban planning, they make me think of psychogeography. An entire chapter in the latter is entitled "Boston Time" and illustrates itself with layers of photographs of a walk down Washington Street in the present of the book's composition and its past, singling out not only buildings and former buildings but weathered milestones and ghost signs, commemorative plaques and graffiti, dates established, construction stamps, spray paint, initials in concrete. "The trees are seasonal clocks, very precise in spring and fall." "The street name refers to the edge of the ancient peninsula. (If you look closely at the ground, you can trace the outline of the former shore.)" "The railroad, which in its day was cut ruthlessly through the close-packed docks and sailing ships, is now buried in its turn." Five and a half decades behind me, the book itself is a slice of history, a snapshot in the middle of the urban renewal that Lynch evocatively and not inaccurately describes as "steamrolling." I recognize the image of the city formed by the eponymously accumulated interviews in the older book and it is a city of Theseus. Scollay Square disappeared between the two publications. Lynch's Charles River Dam isn't mine. Blankly industrial spaces on his map have gentrified in over my lifetime. Don't even ask about wayfinding by the landmarks of the skyline. I do think he would have liked the harborwalk, since it reinforces one of Boston's edges as sea. And whether I agree entirely or at all with his assertion:

If we examine the feelings that accompany daily life, we find that historic monuments occupy a small place. Our strongest emotions concern our own lives and the lives of our family or friends because we have known them personally. The crucial reminders of the past are therefore those connected with our own childhood, or with our parents' or perhaps our grandparents' lives. Remarkable things are directly associated with memorable events in those lives: births, deaths, marriages, partings, graduations. To live in the same surroundings that one recalls from earliest memories is a satisfaction denied to most Americans today. The continuity of kin lacks a corresponding continuity of place. We are interested in a street on which our father may have lived as a boy; it helps to explain him to us and strengthens our own sense of identity, But our grandfather or great-grandfather, whom we never knew, is already in the remote past; his house is "historical."

it is impossible for me not to read it and hear "Isn't the house you were born in the most interesting house in the world to you? Don't you want to know how your father lived, and his father? Well, there are more ways than one of getting close to your ancestors." None of mine came from this city I walk.

The rest of my day has been a landfill on fire.

I am feeling non-stop terrible. I took a couple of pictures in the snow-fallen sunshine this afternoon.

( And be the roots that make the tree. )

spatch sent me a 1957 study of walking directions to Scollay Square. Researcher's notes can be unnecessarily period-typical, but the respondents themselves are wonderful. "You're a regular question-box, aren't you?" It turns out to be part of the basis for a seminal work of urban planning and perception. I like the first draft of the public image of Boston, including its conclusion that it is a deficit to the city not to be thought of as defined by the harbor as much as the river.

Saturday's Hero (1951) was already failing to survive contact with the Production Code when the Red Scare stepped in. To give the censors their back-handed due, the results can be mistaken for an ambitiously scabrous exposé of the commercialization of college football whose diffusion into platitudes beyond its immediate social message may be understood as the inevitable Hollywood guardrail against taking its cynicism too thoughtfully to heart. It just happens that any comparison with its source material reveals its intermittently focused anger as a more than routine casualty of that white picket filter: it is an object lesson in the futility of trying to compromise with a moral panic.

Optioned by Columbia before it was even published, Millard Lampell's The Hero (1949) was a mythbuster of a debut novel from an author whose anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, pro-union bona fides went back to his undergraduate days and whose activism had already been artistically front and center in his protest songs for the Almanac Singers and his ballad opera with Earl Robinson. The material was personal, recognizably developed from the combined radicalization of his high school stardom in the silk city of Paterson and his short-lived varsity career at West Virginia University. Structurally, it's as neat and sharp as one of his anti-war lyrics or labor anthems, sighting on the eternally shifting goalposts of the American dream through the sacred pigskin of its gridiron game. Like a campus novel pulled inside out, it does not chronicle the acclaim and acceptance found by a sensitive, impressionable recruit once he's played the game like a Jackson man for his alma mater's honor and the pure love of football, it leaves him out in the cold with a shattered shoulder and ideals, assimilating the hard, crude fact that all the brotherly valorization of this most patriotic, democratic sport was a gimmick to get him to beat his brains out for the prestige and profit of silver-spooned WASPs who would always look down on him as "a Polack from a mill town" even as he advertised the product of their school in the hallowed jersey of their last doomed youth of an All-American. Beneath its heady veneer of laurels and fustian, football itself comes across as a grisly, consuming ritual—Lampell may not have known about CTE, but the novel's most significant games are marked by dirty plays and their gladiatorial weight in stretchers. It goes without saying that team spirit outweighs such selfish considerations as permanent disability. The more jaded or desperate players just try to get out with their payoffs intact. "I was only doing a job out there. I got a wife and kid, I was in the Marines three years. I needed the dough, the one-fifty they offered for getting you out of there." None of these costs and abuses had escaped earlier critiques of amateur athletics, but Lampell explicitly politicized them, anchoring his thesis to the title that can be read satirically, seriously, sadder and more wisely, the secret lesson that marginalized rubes like Steve Novak are never supposed to learn:

"Of all the nations on earth, it seems to me that America is peculiarly a country fed on myths. Work and Win. You Too Can Be President. Bootblack to Banker. The Spirit of the Old School. We've developed a whole culture designed to send young men chasing after a thousand glistening and empty goals. You too, Novak. You believe the legend . . . You've distilled him out of a thousand movies and magazine stories, second-rate novels and photographs in the advertisements. The Hero. The tall, lean, manly, modest, clean-cut, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon All-American Boy, athletic and confident in his perfectly cut tweeds, with his passport from Yale or Princeton or Jackson . . . To be accepted and secure; to be free of the humiliations of adolescence, the embarrassment of being Polish or poor, or Italian, or Jewish, or the son of a weary, bewildered father, a mother who is nervous and shouts, a grandfather who came over from the old country . . . You have to learn to recognize the myth, Novak. You have to learn what is the illusion, and what is the reality. That is when you will cease being hurt, baffled, disillusioned by a place like this. You won't learn it from me. You won't learn it from a lecture, or a conversation over teacups. But you'll have to learn."

Almost none of this mercilessly articulated disenchantment can be found in the finished film. Co-adapted by Lampell with writer-producer Sidney Buchman and chronically criticized by the PCA, Saturday's Hero sticks with melodramatic fidelity to the letter of the novel's action while its spirit is diverted from a devastating indictment of the American bill of goods to the smaller venalities of corruption in sports, the predatory scouts, the parasitic agents, the indifferent greed of presciently corporatized institutions and the self-serving back-slapping of alumni who parade their sacrificially anointed mascots to further their own political goals. It's acrid as far as it goes, but it loses so much of the novel's prickle as well as its bite. Onscreen, old-moneyed, ivy-bricked, athletically unscrupulous Jackson is a Southern university, mostly, it seems, to heighten the culture shock with the Northeastern conurbation that spawned Steve's White Falls. In the novel, its geography is razor-relevant—it decides his choice of college. Academically and financially, he has better offers for his grades and his talent, but its Virginian mystique, aristocratically redolent of Thomas Jefferson and Jeb Stuart, feels so much more authentically American than the immigrant industry of his hardscrabble New Jersey that he clutches for it like a fool's gold ring. The 2026 reader may feel their hackles raise even more than the reader of 1949. The viewer of 1951 would have had to read in the interrogation of what makes a real American for themselves. The question was a sealed record in the McCarthy era; it was un-American even to ask. It was downright Communist to wonder whether what made a real hero was a gentleman's handshake or the guts to hold on like Steve's Poppa with his accent as thick as chleb żytni, who went to jail with a broken head in the 1913 silk strike and never crossed a picket line in his life. For Lampell, the exploitativeness of football could not be separated from the equally stacked decks of race and economics that drove students to seek out their own commodification. "It is a profound social comment that there are so many Polish, Italian, Jewish and Negro athletes. Because athletics offers one of the few ways out of the tenements and the company houses." The Production Code was a past master of compartmentalization, married couples placed decorously in separate beds. The football scenes in Saturday's Hero are shot with bone-crunching adrenaline by God-tier DP Lee Garmes as if he'd tacked an Arriflex to the running back and if the picture had been ideologically that head-on, it might have lived up to the accusations of subversive propaganda which the presence of class consciousness seemed to panic out of the censors. It feels instead so circumscribed in its outrage that it is faintly amazing that it manages the novel's anti-establishment, not anti-intellectual ending in which Steve, proto-New Wave, walks away from the gilded snare of Jackson determined to complete his education on his own terms even if it means putting himself through night school in White Falls or New York. As his Pacific veteran of a brother gently recognizes, in a way that has nothing to do with diplomas, "My little brother is an educated man." It's a hard-won, self-made optimism, surely as all-American as any forward pass. With the vitriolic encouragement of such right-wing organizations and publications as The American Legion Magazine (1919–), its even more expressly anti-Communist spinoff The Firing Line (1952–55), and the anti-union astroturf of the Wage Earners Committee, the movie after all its memos, rewrites, and cuts was picketed and charges of card-carrying Communism levied against writer Lampell, producer Buchman, and supporting player Alexander Knox.

Why pick on him? The blacklist had already won that round. For his prolifically left-wing contributions to the Committee for the First Amendment, Progressive Citizens of America, the Actors' Lab, the Screen Actors Guild, and the American Russian Institute, Knox had been named in Myron C. Fagan's Documentations of the Reds and Fellow-Travelers in Hollywood and TV (1950). By the end of that year, he had taken his Canadian passport and his family to the UK and returned to the U.S. only for the production dates required to burn off the remainder of his contract with Columbia. Since witch-hunts have by definition little to do with facts and everything to do with fear, the picketers didn't have to care so long as they could seize on his Red-bait reputation—The Firing Line would cherish a hate-on for him as late as 1954—but it remains absurdly true that at the time when Saturday's Hero premiered, he was living in London. His name had been insinuated before HUAC as far back as the original hearings in 1947. Harry Cohn might as well have rolled his own with those memos and let Knox give that broadside denunciation of the great American myth.

Fortunately, even a truncated version of Professor Megroth of the English Department of Jackson University is an ornament to his picture, no matter how irritably he would wave it off. Plotwise, the character is strictly from cliché, the only adult on campus to bother with an athlete's mind instead of his rushing average and return yards, but Knox makes him believable and even difficult, the kind of burnt-out instructor who makes sour little asides about the tedium of his own courses and plays his disdain for sportsball to the cheap seats of his tonier students as a prelude to putting the blue-collar naïf he resents having been assigned to advise on the spot. Can I find a hint that Knox ever played Andrew Crocker-Harris in his post-American stage career? Can I hell and I'd like to see the manager about it. Like the subtly stratified fraternity houses and dorms, he looks like just another manifestation of the university's double standards until Steve goes for the Romantic broke of quoting all forty-two Spenserian stanzas of "The Eve of St. Agnes" and the professor is ironically too good a sport not to concede the backfire with unimpeachable pedantry. "You don't understand, Novak. You're supposed to stand there like a dumb ox while I make a fool out of you." His mentorship of Steve is mordant, impatient, a little shy of his own enthusiasm, as if he's been recalled to his responsibilities as a teacher by the novelty of a pupil who goes straight off the syllabus of English 1 into Whitman and Balzac and Dostoyevsky as fast as Megroth can pull their titles off the shelves, making time outside his office hours—in a rare note of realism for Hollywood academia, he can be seen grading papers through lunch—in unemphasized alternative to the relentless demands of the team and especially its publicity machine that eat ever further into its star player's studies and, more fragilely, his sense of self. "You know, if you continue in this rather curious manner, I may be forced to give you quite a decent mark. Be a terrible blow to me, wouldn't it?" That it doesn't work is no criticism of Megroth, who is obviously a more than competent advisor once he gets his head out of his own classism. As he would not be permitted to point out on film, it is hideously difficult to deprogram a national freight of false idols, especially after eighteen years of absorbing them as unconsciously as the chemical waste of the dye shops or the ash and asbestos fallout of the silk mills. He can talk about truth, he can talk about self-knowledge; he can watch horrified and impotent from the stands of a brutal debacle as it breaks his student across its bottom line. He would have played beautifully the quiet, clear-eyed conversation that the PCA rejected as "anti-American." Barely a line remains, cut to shreds, perhaps reshot: "The dream, the dream to be accepted and secure . . . Once you know it's a dream, it can't hurt." Professor Megroth says it like the only thing he has left to teach the still-raw Steve, whom even a joke about industrial insurance can't persuade to stay a second longer at Jackson than it takes him to pack. Alex Knox would revisit the U.S. only once more in 1980, thirty years after it had chased him out. When he began to be offered parts in American pictures again, he would take them if they were internationally shot.

"One way that fascism comes," Millard Lampell wrote as a senior at WVU in 1940, "is by an almost imperceptible system of limitations on public liberty, an accumulation of suppressions. The attack on civil liberties is one invasion the United States army can't stop. The only safeguard of democracy at the polls is the determination of the people to make it work." Boy, would he have had a lousy 2024. He didn't have such a good 1950, when he was named in the notorious Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television and in short order vanished from American screens until the 1960's. Sidney Buchman followed much the same trajectory, starting with his refusal to name names before HUAC the same month that Saturday's Hero opened. Since he was encouraged to write one of those confessional letters clearing himself of all Communist sympathies, I am pleased to report that Alexander Knox completely blew it by digressing to castigate the House Un-American Activities Committee for exactly the kind of lawless groupthink it claimed to have formed to root out, which he was unsurprisingly right damaged far more of America's image on the world stage than a couple of socially progressive pictures. Is there an echo in here? The blacklist passed over the majority of the remaining cast and crew—veteran direction by David Miller, a journeyman score by Elmer Bernstein, and effective to exact performances from John Derek, Donna Reed, Sidney Blackmer, Sandro Giglio, Aldo Ray, and no relation Mickey Knox—but even the topical boost of a series of college athletics scandals couldn't save the film at the box office. It was Red and dead.

"Athletics! No interest whatsoever in football, basketball, tennis, beanbag, darts, or spin-the-bottle." I have about as much feeling for most sports as Professor Megroth, but I learned the rules of American football because my grandfather always watched it, always rooting for the Sooners long after he had retired from the faculty of the University of Oklahoma. I would have loved to ask him about this movie, the sport, the politics; I would have loved to catch it on TCM, for that matter, but instead I had to make do with very blurrily TCM-ripped YouTube. The novel itself took an interlibrary loan to get hold of, never having been reprinted since its abridged and pulp-styled paperback from the Popular Library in 1950. It's such a snapshot, except the more I discovered about it, the less historical it felt. "I console myself," the novel's professor says, unconsoled, as he shakes hands for the last time with Steve, "with the thought that even if I had said all this, you would not have believed me. You would have had to find out." And then, just once, could we remember? This education brought to you by my curious backers at Patreon.

My poem "Reap the Rules" has been accepted by Reckoning. It is my first sale to the journal; it is a particular honor that it was selected for the conflict-themed special issue It Was Paradise. I wrote it last summer after the U.S. strikes on Iran. It is a prayer dedicated in cuneiform to the oldest goddess I know in that region. The title is a mondegreen from Johnny Flynn and Robert Macfarlane's "Coins for the Eyes" (2022) which was about all I listened to while writing. Curse tablets do not seem to be going out of fashion any time soon.

I feel as though I remember to check out Festivids even less reliably than Yuletide, but this year has been a bonanza of which my socks-blown-off favorites look like "There Is No Ship" (Steerswoman), "ASSHOLE" (Looney Tunes), "Queen Bitch Cartagia" (Babylon 5), and "So It Goes" (Foundation). Honorable mentions to "It's a Sin" (Murderbot) even though I can't separate that song from Derek Jarman and "Hard Knock Life" (The Canopener Bridge) for introducing me to its fandom and perfectly illustrating the concept of storrowing.

My sleep has gone extraordinarily off the rails, but the snow in our back yard is criss-crossed with rabbit tracks. Hestia has broken three of the slats in my blinds in order to provide herself with a better view on Bird Theater.

History, what do you mean that Folkways Records was founded by the son of Sholem Asch who, as one last trick after the scandals of Jewish lesbians and Christian novels, wrote a version of the Nativity recorded for his son's record label by Pete Seeger? What kind of concatenation is that to drop on an unsuspecting person? And is there a reason no artist is credited with the pen-and-ink illustrations depicting the story in 1963 even as the prose sticks to its historical setting, which are maddening me with their sketch-expressive familiarity, although perhaps only because my grandmother had that kind of loose, scribbly, ink-washed line? Ben Shahn at least had the decency to sign his album art. The Claibornes' "Listen, Mr. Bilbo" could have had the luck to lose its relevance since 1946. History, the other kind of convergence was more fun. Listen while I tell you that the foreigners you hate are the very same people made America great.

Mailing our census form back to the city turned out to be slightly more of a Shackletonian trek than I had prepared for, not because I had failed to notice the maze of sidewalks and driveways tunneled out of the snow-walls on our street or the thick-flocked snowfall that had restarted around sunset, but because I had expected some neighbor to have snowblown or at least shoveled the block with the post box on it. It stood amid magnificent, inviolate drifts. I waded. At 18 °F and wind chill, my hands effectively quit on me within five minutes, but even between their numbness and my camera's increasing preference not to, I did manage to take a couple of pictures I liked.

( Laughter doesn't always mean. )

JSTOR showcased Laura Secord with the result that I had to listen, thanks these aeons ago to ladymondegreen, to Tanglefoot.

It is a sign of how badly the last three years in particular have accordioned into one another that my reaction to discovering last year's new album from Brivele was the pleased surprise that it followed so soon on their latest EP. I am intrigued that they cover the Young'uns' "Cable Street" (2017), which has for obvious reasons been on my mind.

I can find no further details on the secretary from the North Midlands who appears in the second half of this clip from This Week: Lesbians (1965), but if there was any justice in the universe the studio should have been besieged with letters from interested women, because in explaining the problems of dating, she's a complete delight. "Well, that's the difficulty. In a way, it means that I have to keep making friends with people because I can't find out unless I make friends with them and then if they are lesbian, there's hope for me, but even then there isn't hope unless they happen to take to me!"

It is always a beautiful day to yell at God, but while you are waiting to take a number for that extremely lengthy line, you might as well stand with Minnesota. Maine, too. I had thoughts about Stolpersteine and Fugitive Slave Acts, but in terms of coherent expression I spent most of my day reacting to the wave of something like scented detergent or dryer sheets that rolled out of the heating system around nine in the morning and stopped me sleeping or particularly breathing well.

I have been re-reading my second edition of Estel Eforgan's Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor (2010/13) which remains a wealth of otherwise inaccessible information with a close eye to the complex interplay of his biography and screen persona. I still disagree frequently with her criticism, but the detail of her research does things like offer a potential reconciliation between the family stories that Leslie was shell-shocked out of the First World War and the absence of his name from any records of active service in France: toward the end of his short stint as a second lieutenant with the Northamptonshire Yeomanry in the spring of 1916, his regiment was billeted with various divisions at Harponville, Ypres, and Arras, where it would have been possible to be officially non-combatant and still, in the immortal words of Frederic Manning, shelled to shit. Leslie himself never claimed to have seen combat, confiding in one of his broadcasts in 1940, "I am willing to let you figure out the degree of my senility by telling you that during most of the last war I was a very junior officer in a cavalry regiment. However, long before I got anywhere near the battlefront, everybody had settled down into trenches, and as horses are practically useless in trenches I found myself near Divisional Headquarters, pretty bored but pretty safe." His daughter records in her memoir A Quite Remarkable Father (1959) that his violent nightmares which could wake anyone within earshot were understood by his family to be connected to his war. She does not seem to have wondered the same about his self-admitted knack for dissociation or his rare but explosive losses of temper. Eforgan follows her in attributing his conviction of heart trouble to hypochondria; it occurred to me that pre-DSM, a person who regularly woke himself shouting and dreaded traveling alone, especially by train in case he shouted his fellow passengers awake with him, could be forgiven the common confusion of a panic for a heart attack. I found Leslie Ruth Dale-Harris née Howard through some cross-checks on Eforgan and the interstitial material contributed by Ronald Howard to Trivial Fond Records (1982) and her portrait of her father is fascinatingly the most fragile of the three, especially since much of what she regards affectionately as his eccentricities and his foibles looks very little out of the ordinary to me, e.g. a capacity for effortless, spellbinding charm right up until his social meter ran out and he had to leave his own party to fall asleep. A droll sense of humor on his own time, a steel-trap comfort with last-minute rewrites and improvisations, and he couldn't tell a formal joke to save his life without cracking himself up over it or lie without self-conscious same. Fifteen years after his death, his daughter still seems amazed that her famously disorganized father, the same nervous mess who had forgotten the ring at his own wedding and needed reminding of everything from call times to the necessity of food, a regular Menakhem-Mendl of the British film industry if she had just acknowledged his Jewishness—like his non-monogamy, it is elided with mid-century tact—threw himself so obstinately and intently into the war effort even when it ran him directly against the prejudices and proscriptions of the Ministry of Information and the BBC. He doesn't just start to look his age in the last years of his life, he looks recklessly burning himself to make his films and his broadcasts and his tours and his connections that Eforgan documents with the Free French and SOE. About a month into the Blitz, he noted with characteristic self-deprecation that after his London flat took a direct hit, "I decided to heed the exhortation of the popular song and 'get out of town'. In fact, I got out of town with a quite undignified haste, arguing to myself that one can prepare a film for production just as well in the country." He continued to travel weekly into London for work until his final tour for the British Council in 1943 and I don't know what he dreamed for any of it. R.I.P. ADH2*2, three cocktails put him literally on the floor.

I seem unable to think about movies except in this secondhand fashion, but I wrote another fill (AO3) for threesentenceficathon. This year it's a lot of noir.

My poem "Northern Comfort" has been accepted by Not One of Us. It was written out of my discovery over the last few years of the slaveholding history of Massachusetts literally under my feet and my more recent anger at the murderously terrified fragility of the current administration. Half my family turns out to be wound into these vanguards of American colonialism and I don't waste my time pretending that the other immigrant half bullied me into demonizing them to death. At this point I am moving past hundred-year tides and into glaciers.

I cannot promise at this stage to do anything more than admire them, but thisbluespirit made me a pair of personalized bingo cards.

( These sisters waiting to wear their own clothes. )

Having entirely missed the existence of Winteractive these past three years, I can see that I will have to visit the Kraken Crossing before the end of March. In even more belated fashion, I have managed to go more than thirty years without seeing the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice partly because nearly everyone I knew in high school was fainting over it and my reactions to most expressions of romance at that time could be described as allergic and bemused, but this interview with Colin Firth has gone a long way toward convincing me that when my brain has reverted to media capability, it too should go on the list.