Never enough time, far too much time

Grey dismal day and I'm at loose ends. There's so much to do, and all of it to be finished by the same deadlines, so that I can't find a place to start. So I'm not doing any of it. It's just like being back in college at exam time.

So, procrastinating. I was hunting through my library for one of my plague books, because Secrets of the Dead on PBS last night reminded me of something I'd meant to do months ago. The show was about some genetic link between resistance to plague and resistance to AIDS- interesting topic but sloppily presented, I thought. I can't really comment on the genetics or virology, but the historical content wasn't terribly well done (not wrong, precisely, but also not right, in classic textbook style), and their medieval statistics were... arguable. But the use of statistics in plague studies could be a show in itself, and not one that would have a very big audience, so I'll shrug and let it go. This time. Hmph.

Anyway, in my book hunt, I found my copy of Instant Lives, by Howard Moss. I'd forgotten I even had it, which is a pity, because it's a fun little book (though I'm sure I bought it for the Edward Gorey illustrations). It's a bunch of strange little biographical sketches of an idiosyncratic selection of writers, artists, musicians (and one filmmaker, Eisenstein), all very New Yorker-esque (unsurprisingly, since Moss was for a long time that magazine's poetry editor). "Ford Madox Ford" made me guffaw and scare the cats: "The war, you know. It's done something to all of us." His face was serious. She looked at him in surprise. "What war?" she asked. "You don't mean..." he began, astonished. "You're trying to frighten me," she went on. "Just because..." "Just because... what?" "I don't know," she responded. "But my uniform. Surely..." "I thought you just... dressed up." "Dressed up?" "Or down, possibly," she added, with contempt. Sounds a bit Monty-Python-does-Lady-Chatterly- "shot off?"

"Jane Austen," "The Brontes" and some of the others are just as good, but my favorite is probably "T.E. Lawrence". It's short and the book's out of print (though admittedly still findable, and worth it), so ( here's the whole thing. )

I should be baking cookies, or doing laundry, or any of a hundred other things. Meh, tomorrow.

Trivia of the weird

Tommy Lee Jones and Al Gore have been first on my list of "what the heck?" college roommates for years (not to discount dearest friend B's adventures with "Neanna the Kleptomanic with the Wanted Felon Boyfriend Who Likes to Sleep Over," our first year at school). But I think they've just been displaced, by the extremely hard-to-picture pairing of Frank O'Hara and Edward Gorey, roommates at Harvard in the '50s. Gosh. What on earth did they talk about?

"This desk set wants to fly."

Okay, remember how amused I was that my newly purchased RotK Frodo was being sold by a guy named Greg Sanders? Well, I just bought the regular Eowyn figure from a guy named Neil Perry, like Robert Sean Leonard's character in Dead Poets Society. That's kind of neat, I think.

The very first piece of fanfic and/or slash I ever encountered was my own, a little thing I wrote after seeing Dead Poets for the first time. At that tender age, I had no idea there was such a thing as fanfic, but the ending of the movie didn't make me happy, so I wrote a story where Todd guessed that Neil was going to kill himself and stopped him (can't remember how), and then they ran away together. Neil became an actor and Todd... I forget, but I know he was the one who paid the bills. I had them living in Boston, and they had a black cat named Sam. They spent all their time thinking about each other and the only thing each of them wanted was for the other to be happy, and they were always one breath away from kissing but it never happened, because I was a kid and I couldn't write it without giggling (think it, yes; write it, no). I know I still have that notebook somewhere around here, but that story will never, ever see the light of day (until I'm long dead and some scholar decides to publish my embarrassing juvenilia, of course). Still, it was kind of sweet (if mushy), and it may have been the only piece of fic I've ever written.

Also, I finally have an Eowyn figure coming my way, and for cheap. EEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!