troisoiseaux

Continued my nostalgic re-reads of formative 2000s YA with A Brief History of Montmaray by Michelle Cooper, a novel about the impoverished, eccentric royal family of a very small island - think Gibraltar, but legally independent, mostly abandoned, and on the other side of Spain? - in the years before WWII, in the form of the diary of 16-year-old princess Sophia FitzOsborne. (I only realized years after originally reading this how much it owes to Dodie Smith's I Capture The Castle, which I've still never actually read.) This holds up delightfully, although it feels almost embarrassingly self-indulgent, in terms of realizing how precisely it's calibrated to appeal to a certain type of teenage girl and how precisely I was part of that target audience, which might be best described as "former American Girl and Dear America girlies." (And, I suspect, Samantha girlies in particular?) Like, it's just sooo.... she's an orphan living in a crumbling castle (with secret tunnels, a slightly unhinged housekeeper, and possibly ghosts) on an isolated island! She feels herself the too-ordinary middle child among her more talented/charming/outrageous/etc. siblings and cousins, but she's our protagonist, of course she has hidden depths! Plot threads include Sophie's crush on slightly older family friend Simon,* whether to move to London to be Presented Into Society as her aunt insists,** and the looming specter of real-world 1930s geopolitics— the boiling-pot build-up to, you know, WWII - a reference to the fascist sympathies of the British upper class in one of Sophie's brother's letters here, a piece of news there - is chilling, but things get dramatic very quickly when two lost German "historians" (or so they claim) wash ashore.

( Footnotes (100% spoilers) )

Continued my nostalgic re-reads of 2000s middle-grade/YA novels with I'd Tell You I Love You But Then I'd Have To Kill You by Ally Carter, the first book in the Gallagher Girls series, set at an all-girls boarding school for TEEN SPIES. As you can imagine, this was my jam in middle school! However, my primary emotion on re-reading this book as an adult was second-hand embarrassment, since main character Cammie (a superspy nepo baby, whose mom is the headmistress of the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women and whose dad died tragically on a top-secret mission) mostly puts the lessons learned in her Covert Operations class - that one man's trash is another's treasure trove of the first guy's secrets, how to build and maintain a cover story, etc. - to practical, if ill-advised, use by... stalking some cute normie boy and then sneaking out to go on dates with him. (I know, I know, this is a YA novel, but COMPLETE waste of an elite spy education, if you ask me.) The climactic sequence where Cammie and friends take their CoveOps practical final - a heist! - was fun, though.

I managed to swing a last-minute day trip to NYC to see Dead Outlaw yesterday after it was suddenly announced (last weekend) that the show was closing early (this weekend), making this the second time in six months I've caught one of the last performances of an unfairly short-lived folk-rock musical at the Longacre Theater that's more or less based off of a real event involving weird things happening to a corpse. (The other was Swept Away; seriously, is the Longacre cursed or something?!) (ETA: ...apparently yes??)

Dead Outlaw is based on the weirder-than-fiction true story of Elmer McCurdy, a train robber killed in a 1911 shootout whose preserved corpse ended up being displayed as part of various carnival sideshows and movie sets throughout the 1920s-40s, until eventually rediscovered in the funhouse of a California amusement park in the 1970s. (Yes, really.) The musical spends approximately equal time on McCurdy's life - a childhood unmoored by a family revelation, a teenage descent into hooliganism and attempt to restart out west, a near-engagement to a nice girl until he self-sabotages, a short and wildly unsuccessful career as an outlaw - and afterlife, which the musical fills with sort of one-song vignettes: the Oklahoma coroner and subsequent series of carnies who displayed McCurdy's body to make a quick buck; the Cherokee runner Andy Payne, who won the 1928 Trans-America Footrace at which McCurdy was displayed as part of the sideshow (only a tenuous connection, but such a cool story I see why they included it); the daughter of a movie director who purchased McCurdy as a film prop, who treats him as a sort of confidant; the 1970s Los Angeles County coroner with a star-studded "client" list.

This show slapped unbelievably hard, as the kids say. I loved the format! There was a live band on stage, and the band's frontman narrated McCurdy's life story (and posthumous adventures) while the action/narrative scenes played out around and occasionally on top of the main set piece, a sort of movable, patio-style stage where the band played; a friend who saw the show before I did described it as "feeling like you were watching a podcast." Some - most? - of the characters' songs are staged... diegetically, as it were, but sometimes they'd join the band "on stage"(-within-a-stage) and take over the frontman's microphone, such as Elmer McCurdy's rock-star-tantrum crash-out ("Killed A Man in Maine", which the narrator informed us afterwards is probably not even true), or more poignantly, as McCurdy's girlfriend's song ("A Stranger") shifts from the in-story action/conversation - identifying his body - to imagining the future they could have had together when she steps up to the microphone alongside the band. Other than Andrew Durand as Elmer McCurdy - whose athleticism in the first half of the show and ability to remain disconcertingly corpse-still in the second half were equally impressive - everyone in the cast played a bunch of different characters; even the narrator doubled as the outlaw who recruited McCurdy, thinking that he was an explosives expert. (He was not.) The music was actually not as consistently folk-rock as I had expected from the couple of songs I'd heard beforehand— particularly in the second half, with its rotating cast of one-off characters, the styles ranged from more typical Broadway numbers to barbershop quartet vibes (the carnival promoters who buy McCurdy's body off the first coroner, claiming to be his brothers) to nightclub-crooner jazz (the LA coroner). It was also SO clever and SO funny— the set-up and payoff of the humor was just brilliant. (In particular, utilizing the under-tapped comedic power of letting the audience stew for a bit: at one point, the narrator is like "and then Elmer was stuck in a closet for 20 years", followed by a solid minute or two of just... a completely dark stage except for a spotlight on Andrew Durand's motionless face, the audience stifling giggles like elementary schoolers told to behave at an assembly.) Very glad I saw this!!

Read Stories I Tell Myself by Juan F. Thompson, his memoir about growing up as the son of writer Hunter S. Thompson. This was obviously interesting to read after seeing The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical, but what really struck me is how Thompson wrote about his volatile childhood, and the relationship he built with his father over the years, through a lens of being both his father's son and a father himself.

Started reading Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser (whose biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder I read a few years back) and I'm curious to see where she's going with this, because there seem to be a couple of main threads emerging: her central argument appears to be that the reason the Pacific Northwest had so many serial killers in the 70s-80s was childhood exposure to lead poisoning and other toxins, but she's also writing a lot about the other ways the PNW can kill you - so far, poor bridge construction and earthquakes - and has started to weave in references to her own childhood on Mercer Island, near Seattle.

For a completely different vibe, I've been re-reading In Defiance of All Geometry and World Ain't Ready by idiopathicsmile, because I rewatched the Les Mis 25th Anniversary Concert and was immediately slammed with teenage fandom nostalgia. It occurs to me that the appeal of both idiopathicsmile's fics (+ the Les Mis fandom on Tumblr circa 2013-15 in general, really) and my favorite actual published YA in high school (Maggie Stiefvater's Raven Cycle) was the premise of having a close-knit group of friends who are deeply passionate about something (social justice! quest for a magical dead Welsh king!) and all a little bit in love with each other. I also discovered from a friend with an AO3 account that our mutual favorite author of canon-era Les Mis fic did not delete her fics, just made them private, so after a decade+ of lurking I finally signed up for an AO3 account, or rather for an invitation(?) to make one, which I will hopefully receive... some time next week?

Read Real Ones by Katherena Vermette, discovered via sabotabby: a novel about about two adult sisters, who are Michif/Métis on their dad's side (this is important), grappling with the public exposure of their estranged mother's false claims of Indigenous ancestry, which she's used to build a career as an artist. I feel like most of the novels I've read tackling race-faking for profit/clout/??? in academia/the arts are biting satires - R.F. Kuang's Yellowface, Elaine Hsieh Chou's Disorientation - and even Louise Erdrich's The Sentence uses supernatural elements to express the violence of white people appropriating Indigenous identity; this one feels... subtler, maybe? It's very much grounded in the family drama of two sisters being betrayed and disappointed yet again by a self-absorbed mother who's betrayed and disappointed them over and over for as long as they can remember, this time playing out with a Greek chorus of op-eds and Twitter takes on a scandal now so weirdly familiar that Vermette tends to reference them obliquely rather than in detail. Really good; I especially liked how distinct the two sisters' voices were, as alternating POV characters.

Read With a Bare Bodkin by Cyril Hare, which fell short of Hare's Tragedy at Law, imo, but honestly, what wouldn't? This one had some fun concepts— set against the backdrop of a minor government agency housed in some sprawling pile for the duration of WWII, the plot kicks off with a conversation about how one of the civil servants is a mystery novelist on the side and everyone going "oooh wouldn't this office be a great setting for a murder mystery?", so it's got quite a crossover of tropes— and also the distinction of being one of the few mysteries where the author pulls a "clearly signaling something as A Clue by having the main character realize that some detail is Significant" and I actually immediately twigged to the discrepancy being hinted at and remembered where to cross-reference the detail earlier in the book, although, to be fair, this was not exactly subtly dropped, either in context or by the author to the reader.

Read Country by Michael Hughes, a more or less beat-by-beat retelling of the Iliad set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles— the Greeks are IRA, the Trojans are British soldiers; Helen (Nellie) was turned as an informant for the British and finagled herself a new life in London out of it, under the not entirely untrue story that she'd run off with a British soldier; the gods are politicians from London and Dublin making back-channel deals and local ones who can be tapped for a favor. God, this was brilliant. This is what retellings are for: a cultural translation with something interesting to say about both the source material and the new context; the oh, that's clever of recognizing how stuff has been "translated", especially when it takes a chapter or two for the significance of a certain detail to click. (I did have the Wikipedia synopsis of the Iliad open for reference the entire time.)

Just started listening to Frank Herbert's Dune as a full-cast audiobook, which I'm coming to pretty much blind – I haven't seen the movies, and to the extent I have learned anything through cultural osmosis, it's that Paul is Space Jesus and it's a metaphor for the fight over oil in the Middle East...? – but liking it so far. Kind of wild to read for the first time in 2025, among all the articles about everyone outsourcing their brains to ChatGPT: "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free, but that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." Like, oh, this is the Torment Nexus from sci-fi classic Don't Build the Torment Nexus.

I recently got around to listening to the cast album for Operation Mincemeat, a new-ish musical about the 1943 British deception operation to disguise the planned Allied invasion of Sicily by planting false documents on a corpse, which I can only describe as "what if Team Starkid wrote a British version of Hamilton?" (Which I don't mean in a bad way! It's not going into my Spotify rotation, but I'd like to see it at some point during its Broadway run.) Obviously, after that, I had to read Ben Macintyre's nonfiction account Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory— it's a doozy of a spy story, stranger than fiction at every turn, from the sheer bonkers Rube Goldberg Trojan Horse of the whole idea to the farcical period where German spies in Spain were trying to get their hands on the documents and the British were pretending like it was of utmost important that they didn't, while also trying to make sure that they did - since that was, you know, the entire point - to the fact that operation mastermind Ewen Montagu's own brother was a Russian spy. (Which explains a subplot of the musical I couldn't quite piece together from the cast album.) I'd actually first encountered this particular bit of spy history during my middle school spy phase, and I remember being enchanted by how they'd conjured up this whole fictional persona down to the stuff in his pockets; it occurred to me this time that they'd essentially reverse-engineered a mystery, with puzzle pieces laid out to be pieced together into the intended misinformation: one of the carefully drafted letters sent by the doomed courier was included solely for a passing reference to sardines as A Clue that the second choice for the planned invasion discussed in the other letters was Sardinia (and definitely not Sicily). It is completely wild that this actually worked.

Anyway! While the plot and characters of the musical Operation Mincemeat appear to be a particularly tongue-in-cheek fictionalization of the actual events and people involved, I genuinely got a little choked up to discover that one of the lines from its song Dear Bill - And why did we meet in the middle of a war? / What a silly thing for anyone to do - is a line from an actual letter the actual Hester Leggett (ETA: actually Hester Leggatt) wrote to "Bill" from his fiancée "Pam."

Finished Paris In Ruins: Love, War and the Birth of Impressionism by Sebastian Smee— osprey_archer beat me to writing a review; I co-sign all points, although I found that Smee's descriptions of paintings made up for the relative lack of actual art reproductions. Followed with Little Dancer Aged Fourteen: The True Story Behind Degas's Masterpiece by Camille Laurens, a slim, sprawling, personal meditation on the famous sculpture and its model, Marie van Goethem, that touches on everything from the pseudoscience of physiognomy* to Marilyn Monroe** to the plight of modern-day refugees and child laborers to the author's great-grandmother and childhood dreams of ballet. Fascinating book to read immediately after Smee's— at one point, Laurens mentions that Degas preferred the label "Intransigent" to "Impressionist" without mentioning the political context of the term,*** which Smee delved into; it's hard to square Laurens' description of Degas who "seemed to harbor an intellectual distrust towards women that closely bordered on contempt" with Degas who pitched a fit over the best way to display Berthe Morisot's drawings at a retrospective of her art that he, Renoir, and Monet organized after her death. (People! They're complicated!) I also found my reading experience overlaid with the palimpsest of a childhood picture book, Degas and the Little Dancer by Laurence Anholt, which made for a wild contrast.

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Currently reading Paris in Ruins: Love, War and the Birth of Impressionism by Sebastian Smee, which I'd acquired after seeing the Paris 1874: the Impressionist Moment exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in December and then just... never actually picked up. Glad I finally did! So far (about halfway through) it's mostly about the 1870-71 Prussian siege of Paris, although it's not not about the Impressionist art movement, as it centers the experiences of Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and other artists. It's the type of narrative non-fiction that reads like a novel, which irks me slightly because there are some details, or feelings that he ascribes to the historical figures he's writing about, that have me like okay, but how do we KNOW this? - not even in a "I'm doubting this account" way! I just want to know if someone had written it in a letter or what! - but also makes for a compelling read, so I don't mind too much.

I don't actually know a lot about the Franco-Prussian war or the Paris Commune, so it's been interesting to learn more about that period. In particular, the use of hot air balloons during the siege of Paris— during my 2023 re-read of Les Mis, I was struck by a reference to hot air balloons in Enjolras' "the 19th century was great, but the 20th century will be happy" speech - "we are on the point of taking the griffin, we already have him, and he is called the balloon" - and this book has added an interesting twist to that. For one thing, apparently Victor Hugo was super interested in hot air balloons! Also, although Les Mis was written about a decade before Nadar's balloons played a vital role in getting letters (and politician Léon Gambetta) out of Paris during the siege, it sort of lends a new significance to the quote, while at the time I'd been like— hot air balloons? How adorably quaint! Just over a century after Hugo wrote this speech, humanity landed on the moon! So, yeah, my apologies to the humble balloon.

Earl
by Louis Jenkins [x]

In Sitka, because they are fond of them,
People have named the seals. Every seal
is named Earl because they are killed one
after another by the orca, the killer
whale; seal bodies tossed left and right
into the air. “At least he didn’t get
Earl,” someone says. And sure enough,
after a time, that same friendly,
bewhiskered face bobs to the surface.
It’s Earl again. Well, how else are you
to live except by denial, by some
palatable fiction, some little song to
sing while the inevitable, the black and
white blindsiding fact, comes hurtling
toward you out of the deep?

...

Lies About Sea Creatures
by Ada Limón [x]

I lied about the whales. Fantastical blue
water-dwellers, big, slow moaners of the coastal.
I never saw them. Not once that whole frozen year.
Sure, I saw the raw white gannets hit the waves
so hard it could have been a showy blow hole.
But I knew it wasn’t. Sometimes, you just want
something so hard, you have to lie about it,
so you can hold it in your mouth for a minute,
how real hunger has a real taste. Someone once
told me, gannets, those voracious sea birds
of the North Atlantic chill, go blind from the height
and speed of their dives. But that, too, is a lie.
Gannets never go blind and they certainly never die.

...

Scientific Method
by James Tadd Adcox [x]

Picture the ocean. No.
Picture the entire thing,
all at once.
You are not doing it.
It’s okay.
One day something terrible will happen,
and I will not be prepared.