Big mistake to go into a career that is 50% reading contracts, when sometimes, the very sight of a contract makes me physically ill.

THE LIVING HAUNTED HOUSE

The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson (1959) / House by the Railroad, Edward Hopper (1925) / The Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe (1839) / Haunted House, Paris Painting, Thomas Flint (2015) / Wuthering Heights, John Frederic Greenwood (c. 1924) / Flowers in the Attic, V.C. Andrews (1979) / Flowers in the Attic dir. Jeffrey Bloom (1987) / Flowers in the Attic: The Origin dir. Declan O'Dwyer & Robin Sheppard (2022) / Guillermo del Toro on Crimson Peak in W Magazine / Crimson Peak dir. Guillermo del Toro (2015) / Guillermo del Toro on Crimson Peak in The Sydney Morning Herald

Anyway, Terry Pratchett invented the Our Blessed Homeland / Their Barbarous Wastes meme, almost 25 years before Tom Gould got around to it

The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2013) dir. Isao Takahata

I really do think that Vetinari is set up to be a partial authorial stand-in. He's 90% character, but that remaining 9.9999% is just slightly too knowledgeable, too good at surviving, too sharp, too sure. (Too disinterested, too incorruptible, too inexplicably noble for a true tyrant.)

Which is why I think the Discworld series really needs a novel where Vetinari keeps getting older and older, and no one wants to ask what happens next.

I'm re-reading the Discworld series for reasons, and honestly the most relatable part of reading these as an adult is how many of the protagonists start out being tired, used to their little routine and vaguely disgruntled by the interruption of the Plot. Sam Vimes wants to lie drunk in a gutter and absolutely doesn't want to be arresting dragons. Rincewind is yanked into every situation he's ever encountered, though he'd much rather be lying in a gutter too. (Minus the alcohol. Plus regretting everything he's ever done said witnessed or even heard about fourth-hand in his whole life.) Granny Weatherwax is deeply suspicious of foreign parts and that includes the next town over; Nanny has leaned into the armor of "nothing ever happens to jolly grannies who terrorize their daughters-in-law and make Saucy Jokes"

Only the young people don't seem to have picked up on this---and that's fortunate, because someone has to run around making things happen, if only so Vimes and Granny and Rincewind have a reason to get up (complaining bitterly the whole time) and put it all to rights. Without Carrot, Margrat, Eric, etc. these characters don't have that reason; they're likely to stay in the metaphorical gutter and keep wondering where it all went wrong or why anything has to change.

............well, that's not quite true. You get the sense that Vetinari knows how much certain people hate the Plot. And as the person sitting behind the metaphorical lighting board of Ankh-Morpork, he takes no small pleasure in forcing the Plot-haters specifically to stand up, and say some lines.

A couple weeks ago I met with my former Handsome Boss and Beautiful Coworker for a drink, because I was downtown and....well, I miss them quite a bit. So we had drinks and talked about work and life and children, and it was wonderful to see them.

Then Handsome Boss asked very casually whether I'd ever come back...?

I had no response.

The thing is, I miss him and working with that team enormously. My loyalty to them is unimpeachable; they are the people I worked with during lockdown, we created a whole book club out of boredom and spit; they could call me tomorrow and I'd pick up the phone, give them whatever they asked. But to be honest....I do not actually miss the work. My current job is broad and under resourced and I'm tired all the time, but I am unequivocally in charge of it. People will do what I tell them to do. I've forged partnerships, I've discovered information siloes and started breaking them down, I understand aspects of our company that even my more experienced colleagues don't see, I have resources that we previously didn't even know existed. I talk to people all across the world and have to worry about global reach, I am trying to juggle about twelve different projects---it's overwhelming but it's also good.

Unfortunately "I'm suffering, but in a way that makes it interesting, weirder and more enjoyable than the suffering I knew when I worked for you" is a singularly strange answer. I wish I had another one.

carpenter and faulkner are both metalheads they broke into my house and told me themselves and then they ritual sacrificed me to their crab god

Hush, child, darkness will rise from the deep and carry you down into sleep, child Darkness will rise from the deep and carry you down into sleep

If gazebo deaths are so widespread, why does anyone ever perform at one? Are they forced? Does the siren song of the gazebo lure them closer until standing under it's awning seems like a good idea? Do they simply not know of the danger, the whole gazebo-eating-peoole thing only known to a few select people? Many questions

I mean.......how do you know that the elevator you step onto won't plummet to earth? How do you know that the salad you order at a restaurant won't give you salmonella? That your car's brakes will go on working, even when you're about to crash into the highway's concrete divider?

How do you know that any part of the world you move through won't kill you?

And then, more troubling---if the people who are tasked with reviewing elevator safety, food safety, car safety, chose to occasionally (occasionally! not all the time, of course not, they're reasonable) look the other way, and let someone hurtle towards their doom....would it be so bad? With that one terrible sacrifice, the inspector ensures that the elevator never breaks, the salad is never rotted, the car will work every. single. time. Or at least, every other time but the first.

This becomes even less clear-cut when the elevator has preferences, when the salad revolts against being eaten with a fork, when the car contents itself with gas every day except the one where it wants blood. Gallons of it.

It's an important precept to remember, in the keeper community. Not every offering laid across a gazebo's wooden planks or iron latticework is accepted. Sometimes, a jazz quartet performs---and despite the keeper waiting with baited breath for the moment of reckoning, the quartet ends their set, packs up their instruments, and leaves. Sometimes, the keeper will find small animals strewn around instead, hallmarks of a gazebo perfectly uninterested in its human audience. (It's uncommon, certainly, but see Leeman et al. 2018 for a longitudinal study on USian gazebo feeding habits.) Not every gazebo wants to swallow a dance troupe whole; some of them prefer stalking prey like loiterers and the homeless, while others will opt for a marching band over a Shakespeare in the Park, for reasons unknown.

Per American Association of Canopy Keepers guidance, unaware victims seem to satiate gazebos for an average period of 2.4 years, compared with knowing victims' 1.87 years; therefore, best practices recommend ignorance. Fortunately for them, at the end of the day, "will this kill me?" is a numbers game, and to borrow a phrase---

Boy, are we bad at math.

obssessed with Mark Pavillion XIII being paranoid and also correct. The Cassandra of gazebo researchers!! This is the peril of being annoying at local government meetings! (anyway I now need this novel too, please write it thank you in advance)

The worst part---or the second worst part, since the first worst part is obviously the fact that the gazebos will rise up once more and demand a bloody toll for all the years of peace they bestowed on their less-than-grateful adherents---is that Mark Jr. has to eventually come down off the stage. He has to stick his poster-board charts under his arm, and catch the bus, take that to the train, and then wait for his cousin Sam to pick him up at the station.

He has to go to family dinner. That's definitely the second worst part, after the probable large-scale slaughter.

There's nothing Mark hates more than the sight of the whole Pavillion clan, gathered around the table. Boasting about their recent schemes to coax garage bands out from basements, charm puppeteers into taking a gig that's long past any child's bedtime. They are the Pavillions, after all! Marcus Pavillion the First was there, he worked with President Washington himself to create the first American gazebo; he corresponded with the Italian masters of the casina, married a woman from the Bavarian Schöns ("The Dianatempel was ours, did you know?" Mark's mother liked to say at parties, then smile coyly.) The Pavillions have been keepers almost as long as there have been structures to keep, theirs is a rich and storied history.

........Mark does not appreciate this. Mark spends most of his time at the kid's table, trying to avoid conversation about whether gazebos prefer to eat in solitary dignity, or to tear into a visiting chamber ensemble with a full audience. It makes him uncomfortable when Kimmy, his youngest cousin, starts scrawling red lines around her smiling clown---"He's being eaten!" she says cheerfully.

Mark does not ask follow up questions.

The problem---after problems one and two, already mentioned---is that he doesn't know if there's any stopping this. With the odd exception (e.g., the 2004 incident that resulted in Hurridge, Minnesota being carefully removed from US maps) gazebos seem content these days to snack on the occasional piano player, with a couple rambunctious kids as an digestif. But Mark has been tracking these things. He knows that the incidents are gathering closer together, both in time and in location. He knows they're getting less easy to predict, less easy to hide, less easy to excuse. His family might sit around the table and complain about keeping 4-5 gazebos happy, but Marcus Pavillion died trying to appease just one. Those times will come again---are coming. Are here. Mark's got the numbers to prove it.

Walking back from the bus stop, Mark finds himself looking up and---suddenly stops dead outside a lot that's been vacant almost as long as he's lived in this neighborhood. There's a safety fence around the property now, and silhouetted in the light is a brand new sign. UNDER CONSTRUCTION, the sign states, above a sketchy outline of a park. COMING SOON!

In the center of the picture sits a gazebo.

Just read your gazebo tags and I'm now very desperate for this story it's just! Such a fun concept!

The wiki entry for gazebos says they're related to "pavilions, kiosks, alhambras, belvederes, follies, gloriettes, pergolas, and rotundas" plus possibly the holhuashis in the Maldives, which leads me to think that various guild members.....maybe went a little overboard with the taxonomy. I mean, it was the 19th century! Everybody was naming butterflies or measuring skull shape or pinning Amazonian beetles---you can hardly blame the zeeb-keepers for getting into the spirit.

Even today, the international conferences can get very dicey when it comes to such things---back in '97, the Italians got very offended by a Turkish keeper, who tried to insist that a kiosk and a pergola were functionally the same breed. Thankfully, only 9 people died. (17 if you count the unfortunate waitstaff.)

I'll also note that the American Association of Canopy Keepers (AACK) has been having a very polite, extremely chilly fight with the British Association for Rotundas & Follies (BARF) practically since the American gazebo was recognized as its own distinct breed. The Brits continue to insist that there's no meaningful difference between the 17th century garden houses at Montacute, and the American summer house at Mount Vernon; the Americans, meanwhile, insist that the Brits simply do not know what they're talking about, and come back once you've invented something as nourishing and enriching as the barbershop quartet.

One thing most people don't realize about Gazebos is how bloodthirsty they used to be until the 1930s or so. It used to be that in order to appease your average small town gazebo you had to feed it 4-5 marching bands a year, or roughly 2 dozen barbershop groups. Noawadays? Throw it a steely dan cover act every 6 months, maybe a bridal party every few years if you're actively trying to court its favor, and you're pretty much in the clear. And the crazy thing is nobody knows why they calmed down, or that their appetite for flesh won't return to its 19th century heights one day. It's actually an increasingly popular theory among modern Gazebo researchers that we're at the tail end of a period of dormancy and it's only a matter of time until they start howling for blood again. And if/when that does happen there's the question of whether our modern zeeb-keepers are really ready for the task of booking enough sacrificial acts to meet that increased demand. Guild policy has gotten lax in the century since the heyday of Dark Pavillionism and a lot of local keepers refuse to even look at newer research that threatens to upset their status quo. Kind of scary to think about

Strange Bird

Andy Kehoe (American, b. 1978, Pittsburgh, PA, USA) - Liminal Communion, Digital Arts: Paintings

By the way, the inspiration for this was a Shen Yun performance, and I swear this Jia Tolentino article was hammering in the back of my head the whole time. It's a good article, but it also made me think about how America has been the refuge of weird splinter religions from the start---and most of whom in the 20st century have used media to conduct outreach. For example, there are ads in '30s pulp magazines for the Rosicrucians' LA branch; the Moody Bible Institute had phenomenal (decidedly creationist) school science videos in the 50s; in the 60s and 70s Pat Robertson (rest in fucking pieces) had CBN and The 700 Club which in turn led to the founding of American-Catholic tv station EWTN. I'm not even getting into the big names objectively associated with "cults", like Heaven's Gate, which leveraged the web as early as the 90s.

Yesterday, paging through the program brought me to an ad for the online "Shen Yun video platform" which feels like a rhyme on all that's come before. I mean, is there anything more quintessentially American than a sleek slick snake oil salesman, trading on all the religion and nationalism we've left lying around?

(Even just the concept of "snake oil" has its roots in American-Chinese-Native relations; one of the first cases the FDA took on was puncturing Clark Stanley's claims that beef fat and turpentine were "Native American" medicines.)

Afterwards, I went home and watched a bunch of youtube videos about Chinese dance: different variants of Mongolian biyelgee, the Yi's flower dance, even some beautiful Uyghur performances, because it came up on my feed and I was fascinated. Ironically, that led me down a rabbit hole---through First Nations/Native American rap; Latvian choral singing; Yemeni Jewish pop music; Chilean fusion. Maybe a song or two from The Hu to round it out.

All this to say....smart is for children, curiosity is forever, and also people should keep making music, writing articles, and doing things, because for good or ill---nothing on this earth is more fascinating to be around.

I do think that my seemingly limitless interest in the world is my best quality. I have other good qualities probably! But I am always, always deeply fascinated by the world and everything in it, such that even a lackluster dance performance can inspire thoughts about making a living as an artist and the creation/performance of identity and communicating meaning as a political act, plus a couple hours spent watching videos of folk dances to try and clear my palate.

The "shrimp colors" meme is part of a long and storied tradition of attributing wonderfully poetic, metaphorically rich, and completely spurious properties to animals and plants. Irises grow from lightning-struck ground, the pelican revives her chicks by drawing blood from her breast with her beak, weasels conceive through the mouth and give birth through the ear canal, the eagle flies up to the sun to burn old age from his eyes, and mantis shrimp see colors we cannot imagine.

It's the kind of thing that fills medieval bestiaries, folk medical traditions, and the writings of Pliny the Elder.