That was Angela's first best friend, Sharon?

Dude, it's Krakow.

OK, the girl Devon's the other one.

OK, the girl Devon's the other one.

Now I'm doubting myself. You're talking about Rayanne, yes?

No! Sharon.

Few. My laziness lost and I looked it up on IMDB.

Devon Gummersall is Krakow.

Devon Odessa is Sharon.

In my continuing obsession with The King in Yellow, I found out that some literary scholars think Chambers may have based the idea for a scandalous work decried by authorities and the Church on J.K. Huysmans' A Rebours (Against the Grain), which I've just purchased. At any rate, it is definitely the "poisonous yellow book" that Oscar Wilde mentioned in The Picture of Dorian Gray. No rumored supernatural properties, but apparently it was so decadent and shocking in its day that people had to be protected from it. Who knew my fascination with the macabre would lead to voluntarily reading classics of French literature?

Also, I found out that the closest real world analog to The King in Yellow is Seress' haunting 1933 song "Szomoru Vasarnap," which was known as the Hungarian Suicide song and banned after scads of listeners took it to heart and threw themselves into the Danube. (The composer's lady love was among their number, leaving behind the song's title on a suicide note.) The composer himself jumped to his death in 1968, though in his case it seems that it was due less to the song's haunting power and more to his failure to follow it up with a similar success in the subsequent decades.

I'm unable to appreciate the full effect (not being conversant in Hungarian), but I recently bought what's supposedly the most evocative English rendition, Billie Holliday's "Gloomy Sunday."

A Rebours is a key text in Wm. S. Burroughs counter-canon. Super decadent, bay-bee! It's even listed in the Catalog of Cool.

Has anyone read Carl Hiaasen's new book Skinny Dip yet?

How is it? I am trying to decide if it is worth taking a hardback on vacation with me.

To be fair, the 20th Aubrey novel is basically unfinished - there are huge chunks just told through letters - and to me reads like a sketch. In fact all the post-Letter of Marque books, once he runs out of actual Napoleonic war, are mildly half-assed and survive on charm and atmosphere and familarity. But I hate the idea of a book 21 anyway; the ending of Blue at The Mizzen is as fitting an close as you could have to the sequence.

Because of my job in cubicle hell, and the policies and practices thereof, I have been doing a decent amount of reading, and finally got around to Handmaid's Tale. Not a lot of additional thoughts, but:

I was poking around on the Internet about it, and found an interview with Atwood. She says that sometimes, people ask her if she's gratified by some of the things she predicted in the book coming to pass, and that her response is along the lines of, "ummm...No?"

Also read Starry Sally J. Freedman As Herself (per recommendation. Was good) and started (and stopped) Dandelion Wine, which I just couldn't get into, though I've liked a good bit of his other stuff.

Currently reading Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, but that feels like I should talk about it elsewhere (fic, particularly, but that's just muscle memory, I think).