One of the things I've been doing this week is rereading Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Mr. Quin. It is said that Harley Quin―a pun-based name Christie came up with about six decades before the creation of the Joker's girlfriend―and Mr. Satterthwaite were her favorite of her own characters, in part because she only wrote about them when she wanted to. Which means that you have to take quality over quantity. There are no Quin and Satterthwaite novels, only this collection and a few other stories.
Satterthwaite, a rather Walter Mitty-ish old man even if he does hobnob with the upper crust, is the viewpoint character and effectively the protagonist. The enigmatic and ghostly Quin doesn't solve crimes himself, but rather listens and makes suggestions. In effect he is a suggestion. He'll appear somewhere in a the course of a story, provide a sounding board for Satterthwaite, and then disappear without warning.
I'm reading a copy borrowed from the library. It's barebones, perhaps disappointingly so. The book doesn't even have a table of contents. They used good paper, though.
Over the last couple of nights, I've watched the first two episodes of the two-season Falling Water, a large number of onetime USA Network shows being available for free on Amazon Prime. Despite a good cast and some visual flair, it's mostly boring pretentious nonsense. But it did get me thinking on my own.
The show is about...well, the fact that I still don't know how to finish that sentence is a big part of the problem. But there's a thread about sleep experiments and a lot of philosophizing about how we could all be connected through dreams.
The writers―like most people, I think―misunderstand what makes dreams interesting. Dreams are weird, yes. But there's no effort to make them weird. They're not scripted to take you really far out. On the contrary, they're almost always skeletal. Their interest comes from their careless minimalism.
A few weeks ago I dreamed that I was in this big dark theatre. Afterwards I was riding on some open-air streetcar through the countryside. How did I get from the theatre to the streetcar running on tracks where there is no street? I have no idea. My brain skipped over that segue.
The odd things you remember from having to get up and pee.
The existence of COVID street art is heartening. Street art in general tends to face some aesthetic limits. But it can also express a certain vitality, a view of life beyond order and orders.
As the author of the article notes, the monoculture is taking root and genuine weirdness is not welcome. It seems like we're being conditioned to a world of diminishing possibilities even on the personal level. So I'm glad enough to see some people with screen printing gear saying, "No."
EDIT: No idea why this didn't post Tuesday night when I wrote it. Internet cooties?
I was curious as to what kind of megafauna might have existed in Australia's past. Diprotodon is one of the answers, and an interesting one at that. Not quite on the scale of the larger mammoths and mastodons in North America, but imposing from the human perspective. The reconstructions make them look a little like a cross between a wombat and a moose.
They existed alongside humans for millennia after the latter arrived, so it's not like they were immediately hunted into extinction. The expansion of the continent's deserts might have had something to do with it. In any case, I wonder how they're reflected in Aboriginal folklore.
Getting ready to go out and face the world again. It snowed last night, but not nearly as much as last night. What happened during the day was that it continued to rain from Thursday, only with much lower temperatures. This led to some slightly treacherous sidewalks, and one intersection where I couldn't get a walk signal because the button was frozen solid. So that kind of thing is more of a concern for me.
Also, may be mailing out a story today. Basically just need to get the formatting done.
