My Week in Media: February 12
Everything I read, listened to, and watched
Hi, friends,
Largely to satisfy my own curiosity, I tracked my media intake this week—I’ve been really good about tracking movies on Letterboxd for years, but pretty haphazard about the rest of it. So I’m hoping that I’ll be better about keeping track if I share?
With a few exceptions, this is purely a list without much commentary—if you’ve got questions about any of the titles, lemme know!
“Horseradish!” said H.M., not gallantly. “I’m the old man. I’m impolite. But then everybody kicks me in the pants and gets away with it, so a little refreshin’ candor on my part is permitted by the best authorities.”
—Death and the Gilded Man, by Carter Dickson
Reading
Nine—and Death Makes Ten, by Carter Dickson
Onward: A Photobiography of African-American Polar Explorer Matthew Henson, by Dolores Johnson
Anastasia At Your Service, by Lois Lowry
To Catch a Thief, by Martha Brockenbrough
More reading
The Snow Baby: The Arctic Childhood of Admiral Peary’s Daring Daughter, by Katherine Kirkpatrick
Despite the multiple rage blackouts I had while reading this book, I did finish it. Kirkpatrick noted the did-he-didn’t-he controversy around Peary’s discovery of the North Pole. She also noted his infidelity, the two children he had with an Inuit woman, and the fact that he never acknowledged them. Unless I missed it, she did not mention that the mother of those children was 14 when that relationship began, though she does mention comparable Inuit marriage ages in other places in the book. Mentioning it in those spots but then not in reference to Peary feels, to me, like a choice made to shield Peary. But, you know. Maybe I’m still irritable.
Antarctic Journal: Four Months at the Bottom of the World, by Jennifer Owings Dewey
I loved the sketchbook/journal/epistolary format of this one, and included a spread below to give you an idea of how it reads. Not included: The utterly horrifying description of a couple of orcas catching and eating penguins—it was genuinely right out of Hellraiser. (In other words, there was split-second flaying.)
The Inuit saw a brother in Matthew Henson not only because of his skin color but because he, of all those in the expedition, chose to learn their language and their way of life. They shared their survival skills with him, and he, in turn, taught Peary and the rest of the crew.
—Onward, by Dolores Johnson
Watching
The Italian Connection
Fernando Di Leo, 1972
The second in a loose crime trilogy, this one stars Mario Adorf, who has rapidly become a household favorite—in this one, he plays a low-level pimp who gets thrown to the wolves by the local Don.
I’m not usually a huge fan of chase sequences, but there’s an AMAZING one in this one: After seeing his wife and daughter murdered, our (very flawed) hero chases the perpetrator down—the perp is in a van, Mario is on foot—grabs the side of the still-moving van, works around to the front, HEADBUTTS HIS WAY THROUGH THE WINDSHIELD, attacks the driver which results in the van crashing, and continues the chase on foot. Both of them somehow get NEW vehicles and continue the chase, and then both of them lose their vehicles AGAIN and continue the chase on foot AGAIN, and then FINALLY Mario catches up with the murderer, does what he needs to do, and only then takes a moment to have some Very Big Emotions. It was so much.
Also, throughout the whole movie he’s being tracked by a couple of American hitmen, and apparently they were the inspiration for Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction.
Also also, the score is fab.
Me and My Gal
Raoul Walsh, 1932
Policeman Spencer Tracy falls in love with waitress Joan Bennett, and they are funny and cute and have great chemistry. It’s one of those odd movies where it feels like different plotlines are in different movies—there’s a whole gangster storyline that’s just a big load of WHAT IS HAPPENING… AND WHY and there’s a slapstick drunk thing that goes on FOREVER that I think was supposed to be funny, but just reads tragic now. It’s a pre-Code movie, though, so it was nice to see a female character make a problematic choice—in this case, hooking up with a Very Bad Man—without having to get killed off at the end.
Scarlet Street
Fritz Lang, 1945
Hoo boy, talk about tragic. Edward G. Robinson is an unhappy middle-aged man who has worked the same boring job for 25 years and wishes he could be an artist; Joan Bennett is gorgeous and young and in love with Dan Duryea, who is THE ABSOLUTE WORST. Edward G. Robinson falls for Joan Bennett, and she—at the urging of her awful boyfriend—starts milking him dry. A lot of twists and turns, and good lord, this movie GOES PLACES. We watched it last night and are still talking about it. A wicked downer, but really super.
Abbott Elementary: This is my current go-to comfort watch. I’m almost caught up, but don’t WANT to be, because then I’ll have to go back to comfort-watching things I’ve already seen?
Lovecraft has received considerable serious critical attention, and despite—or, more likely, because of—his generalized misanthropy and notoriously specific racism, misogyny, and antisemitism, he has remained an enduring figurehead of American horror. Christopher Pike, though his books have sold millions upon millions of copies over the span of the last thirty years, is not somebody whose name you find prominently featured in the critical literature, unless by critical literature you mean “incredulous blog posts by middle-aged women revisiting the beloved thrillers of their early adolescence.”
—Weird Cosmologies and Unsubtle Monsters: The Shared Terrors of H.P. Lovecraft and Christopher Pike, by Sarah McCarry
hahahaha i feel seen
Listening
Culture
Vibe Check
Pop Culture Happy Hour
Podcast Playlist
ICYMI
Maintenance Phase
Books & Language
Shedunnit
By the Book
The Allusionist
If Books Could Kill
News
When the Kite came to retrieve the men, Peary insisted that the ship sail down the Greenland coast to pick up three meteorites, masses of stone and metal that had fallen from outer space. For years, the Inuit had worshiped these “iron mountains” and used the metal in them to make weapons and tools. They were so protective of the meteorites that they kept the location secret. Peary felt that bringing the stones to America would be so important scientifically that it would help him get another leave of absence from the Navy and raise funds for another expedition. He bribed two Inuit men to reveal the location.
—Onward, by Dolores Johnson
TV/Movies
Again With This
How Did This Get Made?
Criticism is Dead
I Saw What You Did
Comedy
Then all at once she turned to me, her face pale, her eyes strangely alight. She said, "Is it possible to love someone so much, that it gives one a pleasure, an unaccountable pleasure to hurt them? To hurt them by jealousy I mean, and to hurt oneself at the same time. Pleasure and pain, an equal mingling of pleasure and pain, just as an experiment, a rare sensation?"
—The Doll, by Daphne du Maurier
Would Daphne du Maurier have been a Hellraiser fan? The world will never know.
Audiodramas
Ten episode miniseries; contemporary locked room mystery. An out-of-work journalist gets tapped by a widowed gazillionaire to investigate the unsolved murder of her husband. Each episode is an interview of one of the suspects, and ultimately, it *is* possible to figure out who did it. (As with the H.M. mysteries, I figured out the WHO before the reveal, but not the HOW.)
Comedy-adventure-mystery set on a minimally-manned space station. I’m nowhere near done this one—only on episode 20-something, and it ran for four long seasons—and I’ve dipped in and out of it, starting and re-starting for years. I am DETERMINED to actually finish it this time. (I always enjoy it enormously when I’m in it—there’s just so much out there to listen to that I get distracted and wander off. Ditto The Magnus Archives—I’m due to re-start that one again soon.)
Short Stories
The Doll, by Daphne du Maurier
The Phantom Hearse, by Mary Fortune (Classic Tales Podcast, ep. 731)
This week’s Major Obsessions—the things I couldn’t stop talking about, apparently even in this post—were the chase scene in The Italian Connection and my newly-discovered loathing of Robert Peary.
Talk soon,
Leila
Peary has depressing Richard Francis Burton and Lewis and Clark echoes... So much these men saw, and so little excuse they had for how they treated those who helped them to see it.
I am a huge Quinta B. fan, and the success of Abbott Elementary couldn't have happened to/for a nicer person.
Wolf 359 sounds like a good time, especially that it's a comedy/adventure/mystery! Cool!