Sarah Monette's Blog, page 47
January 22, 2011
Winter Interlude with Horses
Quick trip out to the barn today, to bring Milo his new winter hood. I went into his pasture and showed it to him (he is phenomenally not-spooky, but he hates not knowing what's going on) and put it on. To my relief, it fits. (The sizes are medium and large, so his trainer and I had to guess whether he's what Dover considers a "medium" horse.) While I was doing that, Milo's pasture-mate came over and explained to me that he is a NEGLECTED horse whom NOBODY LOVES. Certainly nobody EVER scritches his poll the way it needs scritched.
Incidentally, it is difficult to fasten a buckle with a horse's nose in your ear.
So I petted both horses a little, and then, as it was their dinner time and my ears, fingers, and toes were all beginning to freeze solid, I came home.
Incidentally, it is difficult to fasten a buckle with a horse's nose in your ear.
So I petted both horses a little, and then, as it was their dinner time and my ears, fingers, and toes were all beginning to freeze solid, I came home.
l'esprit de l'escalier
I knew there was something else I'd meant to put in yesterday's 5 things post, and I found it just now: this cake wreck (from this post). Because if it had been done purposely as a zombie wedding cake or a splatterpunk wedding cake or a Kill Bill homage cake or a Titus Andronicus Olivier remix cake, it would be SO INCREDIBLY AWESOME instead of just horrifyingly funny.
January 21, 2011
Project Valkyrie: waterlog
60 minutes, 38 laps.
291 miles, 23 laps.
Again, nobody goes to the pool on Friday night. Especially when the temperature is -1 (F).
291 miles, 23 laps.
Again, nobody goes to the pool on Friday night. Especially when the temperature is -1 (F).
achievement unlocked: short story
"To Die for Moonlight," 8,500 words. Booth & werewolves. Finished and submitted to the market that solicited it.
5 things, deep-freeze edition
1.
![[info]](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1380442897i/1319734.gif)
matociquala
has started a memorial thread for Ben on the
Shadow Unit
boards. Ben, as it happens, provided some verisimilitude for me when I was antiquing the script pages of "The Frogs" for one of our early DVD extras. Judge Crater, the British Shorthair of Robert X. Aguilera, the actor who plays Chaz Villette in the alternate reality where Shadow Unit can be found on television (did you follow that?), chewed on Beto's script, as Ben chewed on countless manuscripts of mine, plus magazines, bills, junk mail, newspapers, and paperback books.
I remember the day I was creating Beto's script. I went out into the dining room, where Ben was hanging out under the table. I offered him the script page. He rubbed his face on it once, twice, and then took that perfect chomp. (Much like the owl in the old Tootsie-Pop commercial.) Here, people, was a cat who hit his marks and knew his lines.
2. Smoothly, I segue: there is going to be a Ben Jonson Memorial Sale. I'll make a post probably later today to tell you when and what, but I'll say right now that all proceeds are going to go to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital's Companion Animal Fund, and I will have an option where you can donate even if you don't want or can't afford to buy anything. I will ask that, if you want to donate, you hold off until the sale: I'd like to present a whopping big donation in Ben's name.
3. Moving on to other animals (and thanks to @victoriajanssen for the link): Zooborns has an entry on Egyptian tortoises, which includes this charming video:
4. One more reason I loathe Wisconsin's new governor. (No, no segue. He doesn't deserve one.)
5. Finally, thank you to everyone who has offered sympathy and condolences. Losing Ben was and is really hard for me and
mirrorthaw
, and we appreciate your kindnesses more that I can find the words to say.
matociquala
has started a memorial thread for Ben on the
Shadow Unit
boards. Ben, as it happens, provided some verisimilitude for me when I was antiquing the script pages of "The Frogs" for one of our early DVD extras. Judge Crater, the British Shorthair of Robert X. Aguilera, the actor who plays Chaz Villette in the alternate reality where Shadow Unit can be found on television (did you follow that?), chewed on Beto's script, as Ben chewed on countless manuscripts of mine, plus magazines, bills, junk mail, newspapers, and paperback books.I remember the day I was creating Beto's script. I went out into the dining room, where Ben was hanging out under the table. I offered him the script page. He rubbed his face on it once, twice, and then took that perfect chomp. (Much like the owl in the old Tootsie-Pop commercial.) Here, people, was a cat who hit his marks and knew his lines.
2. Smoothly, I segue: there is going to be a Ben Jonson Memorial Sale. I'll make a post probably later today to tell you when and what, but I'll say right now that all proceeds are going to go to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital's Companion Animal Fund, and I will have an option where you can donate even if you don't want or can't afford to buy anything. I will ask that, if you want to donate, you hold off until the sale: I'd like to present a whopping big donation in Ben's name.
3. Moving on to other animals (and thanks to @victoriajanssen for the link): Zooborns has an entry on Egyptian tortoises, which includes this charming video:
4. One more reason I loathe Wisconsin's new governor. (No, no segue. He doesn't deserve one.)
5. Finally, thank you to everyone who has offered sympathy and condolences. Losing Ben was and is really hard for me and
mirrorthaw
, and we appreciate your kindnesses more that I can find the words to say.
January 20, 2011
In memoriam: Ben
Ben
(a.k.a Ch. BeMy Medallion Rose a.k.a. Ben Jonson a.k.a. the Elder Saucepan)
February 2, 1995 - January 20, 2011
(a.k.a Ch. BeMy Medallion Rose a.k.a. Ben Jonson a.k.a. the Elder Saucepan)
February 2, 1995 - January 20, 2011
January 19, 2011
saucepan update
The Elder Saucepan is doing a little bit better. The vet said he ate a little bit this morning, and he's much more alert and friendly. I am going to visit tomorrow to see if I can help encourage him to eat.
The reason he was feeling so terrible is that his calcium levels were extremely high. (The vet said they were the highest he'd ever seen in a cat.) They have him on medication to bring his calcium back down to normal, leaving the question, of course, of what's causing it to skyrocket.
The two most likely hypotheses at the moment are:
1.) parathyroid disease
2.) bone marrow cancer
Since the ultrasound they did on his throat didn't reveal enlarged parathyroid glands, cancer is unfortunately the more likely suspect, although parathyroid can't be ruled out completely until the bloodwork comes back. If it's not parathyroid, we're probably not going to go any farther with diagnostics which will be uncomfortable, stressful, and dangerous for the cat, and will only confirm what we'll already know: this is probably going to be what kills him, and it's down to the question of how long we can keep him happy and comfortable.
As no one will be surprised to hear, between the diagnostics and the three days so far in the hospital, this adventure is getting very expensive. I am considering breaking my long-standing policy of only donating my author's copies to charities and having a sale to benefit the Elder Saucepan. I would be offering sets of the Doctrine of Labyrinths in both hardback and paperback, A Companion to Wolves in hardback and paperback, The Bone Key (trade paper), and whatever other weird stuff my closet disgorges. Everything would, of course, be signed and personalized as the buyer wished, and I would ship anywhere in the world. I'm still thinking about prices--and, indeed, about whether I'm going to do this at all. You are welcome to indicate interest, and it will not be taken as a commitment.
The reason he was feeling so terrible is that his calcium levels were extremely high. (The vet said they were the highest he'd ever seen in a cat.) They have him on medication to bring his calcium back down to normal, leaving the question, of course, of what's causing it to skyrocket.
The two most likely hypotheses at the moment are:
1.) parathyroid disease
2.) bone marrow cancer
Since the ultrasound they did on his throat didn't reveal enlarged parathyroid glands, cancer is unfortunately the more likely suspect, although parathyroid can't be ruled out completely until the bloodwork comes back. If it's not parathyroid, we're probably not going to go any farther with diagnostics which will be uncomfortable, stressful, and dangerous for the cat, and will only confirm what we'll already know: this is probably going to be what kills him, and it's down to the question of how long we can keep him happy and comfortable.
As no one will be surprised to hear, between the diagnostics and the three days so far in the hospital, this adventure is getting very expensive. I am considering breaking my long-standing policy of only donating my author's copies to charities and having a sale to benefit the Elder Saucepan. I would be offering sets of the Doctrine of Labyrinths in both hardback and paperback, A Companion to Wolves in hardback and paperback, The Bone Key (trade paper), and whatever other weird stuff my closet disgorges. Everything would, of course, be signed and personalized as the buyer wished, and I would ship anywhere in the world. I'm still thinking about prices--and, indeed, about whether I'm going to do this at all. You are welcome to indicate interest, and it will not be taken as a commitment.
Project Valkyrie: waterlog
55 minutes, 36 laps. 290 miles, 21 laps.
Nothing makes me hate my fellow creatures more than having to share a lane.
Nothing makes me hate my fellow creatures more than having to share a lane.
January 17, 2011
UBC: The Murder of Helen Jewett
Cohen, Patricia Cline. The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.
This is the book I wanted The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers to be. If Helen Jewett had been published first, I would assume that Mary Rogers was an attempt to imitate it, but in fact, Mary Rogers was published in 1995, three years before Helen Jewett.
It's clear that Srebnick and Cline are attempting to do the same thing: to take a cause celebre murder of New York in the mid-nineteenth century and use it to explore the ways in which class and gender roles were being re-formed, and to talk about the rise of sensationalism in both journalism and fiction and its relationship to the naked female corpse.
And it's odd that the book about Mary Rogers was written first, because Helen Jewett is in every way a better fit. All Rogers has going for her, in this context, is Poe's story, "The Murder of Marie Roget." One of the things I complained about when I read Mary Rogers was the lack of primary evidence to back of Srebnick's speculations about Mary Rogers' life and death. Jewett, on the other hand, through a combination of character, circumstance, and coincidence, left a paper trail that is a historian's wet dream. She was a prolific letter writer, and many of her letters were published by the penny press after her murder. The trial got extensive coverage. The fact that her murderer was a young man of good family (nineteen year old Richard P. Robinson, the son of a Connecticut state legislator) and the fact that she had been, before embarking on her career as a prostitute, a maid in the house of a prominent Maine judge (who had sons of the same age as her murderer), meant that a great many men wrote about her (self-servingly, and Cline does a lovely job deconstructing their defensive rhetoric). And as it happens, as the judge's precocious and charming maid, she was mentioned in Anne Royall's Black Book. So it is possible to trace her from her birth Dorcas Doyen through a series of self-chosen aliases: Maria Stanley, Maria Benson, Helen Mar, and finally, the name she died under at the age of twenty-three, Helen Jewett.
Jewett was murdered in 1836; Rogers in 1841. The treatment of Rogers in the press probably owes a good deal to the sensation surrounding the trial of Jewett's murderer and the way her naked body was described. (Cline also has a much better sense of how to use her primary sources; when she says a source demonstrates something--such as the creepy eroticism with which the newspaper editor James Gordon Bennett described Jewett's corpse--she quotes evidence.) Finally, Mary Rogers' death is so mysterious as to be inconclusive, as least as it's presented by Srebnick. Cline, on the other hand, has a murderer and a murder trial--and the grotesque miscarriage of justice by which that murderer was acquitted. (Even aside from the hash the D.A. made of the prosecution . . . since Jewett was murdered in a brothel, the witnesses who place the murderer at the scene, witnesses who corroborate each other's stories, are two white prostitutes, a white brothel owner, and an African-American servant. The D.A. didn't call any of the women's clients as witnesses because those gentlemen begged him not to. The vague and unconvincing testimony that gave Robinson an alibi came from professional-class white men. In his closing remarks, the judge instructed the jury that they had to discount the prostitutes' testimony on the basis that prostitutes "are not to be entitled to credit unless their testimony is corroborated from others, drawn from better sources" (317).)
Cline is a comprehensive and exhaustive researcher; her endnotes contain everything from information on how time was reckoned in 1836 New York to the life and eventual fate of one of Helen's other clients. She explains why she accepts some documents in the case as authentic and discards others as frauds, and her reasons are logical and convincing, and do not rely on "because I want them to be." She is very good at reading against texts, necessary when up to one's chin in the inflated rhetoric of the 1830s, and she uses her evidence to present the best portrait she can of Helen Jewett and her world.
The whole thing is full of fascinating details--Cline is a geek for the history of New York City, which makes the book doubly awesome as far as I'm concerned--but the one I want to offer is about the fate of Helen Jewett's body:
Unfortunately, an endnote tells us, if the medical school even still had Jewett's skeleton in the 1860s, it was destroyed in a fire. I love this tangent for what it tells us, both about the city's casual cannibalism of itself from the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, and about the very specific, ghoulish mise en scène of 1836. And it is typical of the book as a whole.
This is the book I wanted The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers to be. If Helen Jewett had been published first, I would assume that Mary Rogers was an attempt to imitate it, but in fact, Mary Rogers was published in 1995, three years before Helen Jewett.
It's clear that Srebnick and Cline are attempting to do the same thing: to take a cause celebre murder of New York in the mid-nineteenth century and use it to explore the ways in which class and gender roles were being re-formed, and to talk about the rise of sensationalism in both journalism and fiction and its relationship to the naked female corpse.
And it's odd that the book about Mary Rogers was written first, because Helen Jewett is in every way a better fit. All Rogers has going for her, in this context, is Poe's story, "The Murder of Marie Roget." One of the things I complained about when I read Mary Rogers was the lack of primary evidence to back of Srebnick's speculations about Mary Rogers' life and death. Jewett, on the other hand, through a combination of character, circumstance, and coincidence, left a paper trail that is a historian's wet dream. She was a prolific letter writer, and many of her letters were published by the penny press after her murder. The trial got extensive coverage. The fact that her murderer was a young man of good family (nineteen year old Richard P. Robinson, the son of a Connecticut state legislator) and the fact that she had been, before embarking on her career as a prostitute, a maid in the house of a prominent Maine judge (who had sons of the same age as her murderer), meant that a great many men wrote about her (self-servingly, and Cline does a lovely job deconstructing their defensive rhetoric). And as it happens, as the judge's precocious and charming maid, she was mentioned in Anne Royall's Black Book. So it is possible to trace her from her birth Dorcas Doyen through a series of self-chosen aliases: Maria Stanley, Maria Benson, Helen Mar, and finally, the name she died under at the age of twenty-three, Helen Jewett.
Jewett was murdered in 1836; Rogers in 1841. The treatment of Rogers in the press probably owes a good deal to the sensation surrounding the trial of Jewett's murderer and the way her naked body was described. (Cline also has a much better sense of how to use her primary sources; when she says a source demonstrates something--such as the creepy eroticism with which the newspaper editor James Gordon Bennett described Jewett's corpse--she quotes evidence.) Finally, Mary Rogers' death is so mysterious as to be inconclusive, as least as it's presented by Srebnick. Cline, on the other hand, has a murderer and a murder trial--and the grotesque miscarriage of justice by which that murderer was acquitted. (Even aside from the hash the D.A. made of the prosecution . . . since Jewett was murdered in a brothel, the witnesses who place the murderer at the scene, witnesses who corroborate each other's stories, are two white prostitutes, a white brothel owner, and an African-American servant. The D.A. didn't call any of the women's clients as witnesses because those gentlemen begged him not to. The vague and unconvincing testimony that gave Robinson an alibi came from professional-class white men. In his closing remarks, the judge instructed the jury that they had to discount the prostitutes' testimony on the basis that prostitutes "are not to be entitled to credit unless their testimony is corroborated from others, drawn from better sources" (317).)
Cline is a comprehensive and exhaustive researcher; her endnotes contain everything from information on how time was reckoned in 1836 New York to the life and eventual fate of one of Helen's other clients. She explains why she accepts some documents in the case as authentic and discards others as frauds, and her reasons are logical and convincing, and do not rely on "because I want them to be." She is very good at reading against texts, necessary when up to one's chin in the inflated rhetoric of the 1830s, and she uses her evidence to present the best portrait she can of Helen Jewett and her world.
The whole thing is full of fascinating details--Cline is a geek for the history of New York City, which makes the book doubly awesome as far as I'm concerned--but the one I want to offer is about the fate of Helen Jewett's body:
On Monday, Helen Jewett was buried in St. John's Burying Ground, about a mile north of Thomas Street. Bounded by Leroy, Clarkson, Hudson, and Varick (now Seventh Avenue) Streets, the cemetery was associated with St. John's Episcopal Church to the south on Varick. It was the only Episcopal burying ground in active use in the city since an 1831 edict closing off new interments in the overfilled churchyards of Trinity and St. Paul's. Someone [...] approached the rector of St. John's on Sunday or Monday to arrange a plot for the murdered prostitute, paying six dollars for the privilege of Christian burial. [...]
St. John's Burying Ground became Hudson Park in the 1890s, and in turning the land over to the city, the parish advertised widely for anyone with loved ones to reclaim and rebury the bodies interred there; few did. The remaining thousands of bodies and hundreds of monuments were turned under the soil, covered by a formal French park graced with a belvedere overlooking a reflecting pool. The park was renamed James J. Walker Park in the 1940s, in honor of a beloved New York mayor who lived in an 1860s brownstone on Leroy Street across from the site. In 1972, a backhoe transforming the park into a playground ripped into underground crypts that had long been forgotten.
But Helen Jewett did not meet that backhoe. She was not in Walker Park, nor Hudson Park, nor St. John's Burying Ground, not for long anyway. Four nights after her burial, medical students went at her grave with spades and pickaxes, removed her body in a bag, and carted it off for dissection at the College of Physicians and Surgeons on Barclay Street. A short time later, the Herald reported, her "elegant and classic skeleton" hung in a cabinet at the medical school.
(264-65)
Unfortunately, an endnote tells us, if the medical school even still had Jewett's skeleton in the 1860s, it was destroyed in a fire. I love this tangent for what it tells us, both about the city's casual cannibalism of itself from the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, and about the very specific, ghoulish mise en scène of 1836. And it is typical of the book as a whole.
