PicoBlog

This piece is a part of the Linda Darnell Centennial Blogathon, organized by Samantha Richardson. You can read the rest of the entries celebrating the queen of Fox in the ‘40s at Musings of a Classic Film Addict.If you’ve heard of the film Forever Amber before, you might have heard about it in comparison to Gone With The Wind, and not in flattering comparison. Since its release in 1947, eight years after Gone With The Wind, Forever Amber hasn’t quite managed to get out from under the shadow of that gargantuan classic, the juggernaut of 1939 so unstoppable that even the strongest other offerings from that year, films as good and as distinct as Stagecoach, Love Affair, Ninotchka, The Women, The Old Maid, and Midnight were threatened with the same kind of eclipse.

Hi there. I was planning to write a goofy newsletter all about television shows but then yesterday morning I was in the bookstore reading poems and crying and thought, no, that’s better. So this is going to be about sad poems. Not just sad poems—death poems. Even within the subsection of sad poems that is death poems, there are so many kinds! Dead mother poems, dead father poems, dead husband poems, dying self poems!

(Note: Paying subscribers, your gift is at the bottom, as usual.) Let’s start this investigation by listening to one of the most famous recorded jazz solos of all time, Louis Armstrong’s unaccompanied trumpet introduction to “West End Blues,” recorded in June 1928 (for our purposes we don’t need to hear the whole piece right now): Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.Now, please listen to just the second half of that solo intro:

When I was dragged (not as reluctantly as I pretended) on walks as a child by my parents, I often amused myself by going off into my own fantasy world: I'd look at derelict buildings and imagine the banshees and spectres who lived in there, wander off into trees and do battle with the dinosaurs and quarter-wolf creatures of my imagination. Water towers were recently landed alien spacecraft. All caves contained witches or ogres.

First, a shameless sales pitch. I've been talking about my new book, A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps, quite a lot recently. One side effect of this is I've not been pushing this newsletter quite as hard as I normally would, and if you stop pedalling you stop growing and oh god. So here’s one of those special offers I like to do every now and again, just to keep things humming: subscribe this week and you can have a year for just £24.

Normally I send out the extract from the archive on a Saturday morning. But there are still a few hours to go before Black Friday turns into Grey Saturday, so I thought I’d do it now and remind you of this special offer: ' Get 50% off for 1 year Sign up now! While stocks last! One of the most mindblowing things I have ever learned concerns the “genetic isopoint”. This concept, also known as the “identical ancestors point” (IAP), or “all common ancestors” (ACA), is the most recent point in a particular population’s past at which everyone then alive either has no living descendants left, or is the ancestor of everyone currently living.

On the way here to Tulsa I revisited Christopher Clouser’s The Midwest Associate: The Life and Work of Perry Duke Maxwell and after finally seeing how transformed this course is, there will be great interest in Maxwell now that we can see his ideas in full form (with all due apologies to past majors here). I thought I’d share a few favorite anecdotes to embellish your PGA viewing the next few days and to possibly drive you to support the author who worked so hard to tell us Maxwell’s fascinating life story.

Some people say that writers should include an opening paragraph, explaining why they’re looking at a particular subject this week. I say those people are all cowards. Julian “the Apostate” (361-363) Last pagan emperor – wanted to ignore all that newfangled Christanity stuff his uncle Constantine had introduced, in favour of the traditional Roman pantheon. This could have radically altered the history of Europe, but less than two years into his reign Julian died on campaign against Persia, and that was pretty much that for polytheism.

The success of Scott Alexander (AKA Scott Siskind) seems unlikely. He’s done everything we’re told you shouldn’t do when writing on the internet. His essays are frighteningly long. His language is not simple. And he doesn’t have a personal brand, exactly. He does cluster around a few subjects repeatedly—psychiatry and political philosophy, for example—but he also does whatever the fuck he wants to. When his whim dictates, he’ll pen surreal stories about psychedelic cacti, dole out advice to Republicans, or tackle tricky philosophical questions with comic dialogues.