Questions of Scale

in

This morning, I stumbled blearily out of bed. "I had a terrible nightmare just now," I said to D.
"So did I," he interjected, "It was about a humongulous."
"A what?"
"A humongulous."
"I don't know what that is."
He begins confidently tapping away in a flourish of Google triumph. But the search gods are fickle - there's no trace of this word. He tries several alternate spellings: no luck.
"Why don't you tell me what it means?" I suggest.
"It's a tiny, miniature version of a person...."
"A homunculus."
"That's it!"
"Why was that a nightmare?"
Defensively: "It just was."
Pause. I ponder.
"Wait. Why would a *tiny* person be called a humongolous...?"
(In a rush:) "I don't know. I don't like you."

My dream, overlooked in the tumult of homunculi, involved having to climb an appallingly huge mountain, and feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. (Thanks for the subtle - almost impenetrable - response to my Mt. Grademore anxiety, unconscious mind. You always do such seamless work.) Suddenly my friend Leslie showed up, and announced that she was here in her (new) professional capacity as a (and I quote) "mountain dominatrix.". She made me first go up and then into the mountain, where we then watched a Canadian-style Heritage holographic performance about the history of miners' unions. This quickly devolved into a a spy caper in which I was being chased by a serial killer, whom I had to killed in appalling, gory detail in order to keep him from murdering me and my grandmother.

I think I need to read fewer crime thrillers.  And grade fewer papers.

In the apocalyptic mode

in

You may remember that the family Sycorax has some rather eccentric holiday traditions, not least of which is the (bi-)annual celebration of Solstice in a serious of elaborate theatrical party-rituals.  There are rules: you may want to review them.

This year's Solstice bore a particular burden, as it was also the Mayan End of Days.  The Apocalyptice, so to speak. The Party to End All Parties.

Things you would have heard chez Sycorax in this year's Solstice crescendo:

Mère Sycorax:   Oh! D! Would you like to wear this monocle?
D:   Um.... Probably not?

“Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
in the bleak midwinter, long, long ago.”

(Some time later....)

Ariel:   Do these peacock stockings look OK?
D:   Yes.
Ariel:   They don't look ridiculous?
D:   You're about to put on horse-head-shaped eyelashes. Why are you worrying about the stockings?

D was clearly channeling Man Ray when he took this photograph.

D was clearly channeling Man Ray when he took this photograph.

Enthusiasm of Links: I work in the Institute of Neologisms, but at lunchtime I go out and sit in the Cemetery of Forgotten Words.

in

And so the great task continues: clear away the accumulated drifts of fascinating - nay, EXCELLENT - links I have to share with you, in a frenzy of enthusiasm.  Here you are, a mix of new and classic:

  • Do you read Dear Sugar?  I think Sugar's officially taken over from Carolyn Hax and Dan Savage as my favorite "agony aunt," although there's room enough in my heart for all three.  Truth be told, I did enjoy this recent exchange from Judith Martin.  It's a whole new (glorious) world, people.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: Can my 15-year-old granddaughter wear a short cocktail dress to a black-tie wedding?

GENTLE READER: Can you stop her?

  • I covet this modernist bird feeder, sleek and lovely. Also: Elevenfiftyfour's a Canadian company, which means I don't have to grapple with customs brokers.  Rare online shopping win for the True North Strong and Free (Shipping)!
Owly Images
  • On an entirely unrelated note, I swear, if you are in Scotland (or perhaps elsewhere in the UK?) you can listen to Alan Cummings - may his brilliance know no bounds - read Robert Burns's "Cock Up Your Beaver."  Alas, I can't, being in national exile from the BBC.

  • An alpha female from Yellowstone's wolf population called 832F was killed by hunters.  She was tremendous popular among visitors to Yellowstone, and researchers were tracking her movements when she was shot outside the confines of the park.  I know my feeling of sadness about this is colored by a slightly suspect anthropomorphizing of wolves, but I'm not sure how to reel that narrative back in, mentally.

Things that left me famished:

  1. Buttery Smashed Tiny Potatoes
  2. Toffee Chocolate Chip Shortbread
  3. Rosemary Salted-Caramel Apple Pie (you had me at Salted Caramel)
  4. How to Make a Classic Tarte Tatin (look at that gloriously messy photo)
  5. Mushroom Gruyere Pasta.

  • If you have an interest in gender, questions about trans and cis terminology, or a deep and growing discomfort with the rhetoric of binarism, check out Not Your Mom's Trans 101. Among the many fascinating insights: "The fallacies of binding identity to bodies, which are fragile, changeable things, subject to injury, mutilation, maiming, decay and ultimate destruction, should by now be clear."

  • Investigators are considering exhuming In Cold Blood's Perry and Dick to see if there is DNA evidence that links them to the midcentury murder of a Florida family. A murder that Truman Capote has them discussing contemplatively in his true-crime masterpiece.

  • Last, but not least, Archivedbook: because as every year comes to a close, I wish I could print the capsule of my compiled Facebook interactions and preserve it for posterity.  Because I'm a theatrical solipsist. Because I wish I had encapsulated lives like this for each of my unknown ancestors.  Because we're no longer an epistolary society, but that doesn't mean we don't leave traces.

“Most young writers and artists roll around in description like honeymooners on a bed.”
— James Agee