the bats have left the belltower

[freckles_and_doubt]

I don't know if it's the weather (which continued hot until about five minutes ago, when it started raining, yay!) or the various levels of Unfortunate Event in my immediate vicinity, but dagnabbit, I'm sleeping badly at the moment. Stress always goes straight to my sleep patterns, which burgeon forth into weird dreams, hypnagogic hallucinations, sleepwalking and my current infliction, insomnia. Tried to sleep last night from 10pm onwards. Couldn't, other than snatches of a light and uneasy doze punctuated by the cat climbing on me, and perambulation. Got up four times: (1) arose with sudden conviction I had to be somewhere and do something important; donned dressing gown upside-down, got to door before realising the urgency was entirely delusional; (2) car alarm went off randomly and for no reason, got up to check house wasn't being carried away bodily by burglars (apparently not); (3) repeat of sleepwalking episode, but with other dressing gown on inside-out; (4) random rain started, got up to close windows, whereupon the rain stopped. I think I finally drifted off somewhere around 2.30am, waking up just before 6 for no reason known to science. I am inutterably frayed today. Therefore, I shall console myself by talking about random interesting books.

This lot is all Scroob's fault. One of the huge advantages about bloggery is the way that it acts as a sort of life record: it makes you realise precisely why all those eighteenth-century ladies wrote journals, in case they ever needed to remember the exact day on which they were so rude to the Duchess of Plin at the garden party, and who was listening. I quite often resort to my own deathless prose in order to work out when I was doing what where (although not whom), and in one of those forays recently stumbled over the comment in which Scroob recommended The Spellman Files. I'm not sure why I didn't follow up the suggestion at the time, but I've just finished the first two books in the series and am about to embark on the third. I'm captivated, mostly by horrified fascination mixed with amusement and narrative glee.

Lisa Lutz's The Spellman Files is a sort of demented private investigator/dysfunctional family saga, following the antics of Izzy Spellman, who has been working for her family's private investigation firm since she was a child. The upshot of her less than normal upbringing is a set of bizarre, offbeat yet perfectly logical interactions with the world: the family is basically amoral, or at least otherly moralled, completely bats, absolutely lacking in social inhibition, narcissistic, pragmatic, unscrupulous, manipulative, paranoid, very tightly knit, and hilarious. The genius is in the writing, though: the whole thing is beautifully delivered in a sort of deadpan case-report tone that makes extensive use of flashbacks, interrogations, recordings, evidence analysis, footnotes and Izzy's own OCD tendency to make lists. (The ex-boyfriend list is genius. I really have to admire a girl who can assess new male acquaintances in terms of their ex-boyfriend possibilities.) Bonus in-text fangirling of Get Smart, which I really ought to watch one of these days just in solidarity and because CONTROL and KAOS are so magnificently silly¹, and the new Doctor Who. I love these books. Borrow them from me. Get your own.

---

¹ Good lord, I've just realised that Get Smart used to be on TV in Zim when I was a kid - I vividly remember its opening sequence with the long series of doors, which caused me to collapse giggling when watching the opening-glass-doors opening sequence of Hot Fuzz, which is a movie that's too bloody knowing for its own good. Also, Rowling's Ministry of Magic dropping-phone-box entrance is so a rip-off. In Hot Fuzz it's an homage, in Rowling it's a ripoff. Pay attention.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Yay! Glad you discovered this at last. Also, note to self, find books 2 and 3 forthwith.

I had to actually find an American to ask whether that Get Smart stuff was true. Wow.

scroob

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I knew Get Smart existed, but I mostly remembered the opening sequence and various stupid bits of dialogue; no recollection of the KAOS and CONTROL bits, which are very silly but which Wikipedia assures me are true...

And thank you. Excellent literary tip. If I'd got my butt in gear earlier I could have lent you at least the second book while you were here.

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, well I would have had to decline said loan anyway, on grounds of Elfbaby and reading time being fundamentally incompatible. I believe this may eventually change. Eventually.

Ooh! Wordver is "dried engineers". I bet Nasa would be interested in that, sounds handy.

Cape Town zombified

[dicedcaret.livejournal.com]

Based on my own poor sleep of the past few nights and similar sentiments seen on Facebook, it's safe to assume a lot of people are the walking dead at the moment.
Thunder storms, heat, humidity, unsettled cats, mosquitoes, similarly disturbed bed sharer... it's a wonder we're not re-enacting Fight Club.

Re: Cape Town zombified

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Ah! I have a Fight-Club deferring solution - I've just remembered that my slow-release magnesium supplements make me sleep like a deeply dead thing, with the added bonus that they also stop my calves from randomly cramping at 2am. I have a Plan for tonight, then. (It starts "find magnesium supplements" and may therefore be slightly doomed, but I have it, dammit!)

[veratiny.livejournal.com]

I am a tooth grinder--in the same family of sleep disturbances as night terrors and sleep walking (although I don't do either of those things--they are all hereditary apparently). When I sprained my jaw (the down sides of which may be hilarious in retrospect but where not funny at the time and which I’ll refrain from sharing) the Dr gave me a very low dose of the anti-depressant endep. Apparently at very low doses (as in too low to have any depression suppressing affect—because one should always maintain ones state of depression!) it acts as a muscle relaxant—inability in brain to relax said muscles being the root cause of the problem. Gentle beautiful dreamed filled sleep with none of the nasty side zombifying affects of sleeping tablets (and for the bold, may I recommend them with a nice glass of Cab Merlot). I hold high hopes for your self perscripted magnesium treatment...good luck!
Just an aside: my daughter occasionally gets night terrors—I understand why people believe in demon possession they are terrifying to behold.

Night terrors

[schedule5.livejournal.com]

My grandmother was a sleepwalker, and I have been known to do it to. I *think* my son is getting night terrors. He wakes up screaming, but is not actually really awake. Then we start with sceaming, arching his back, thrashing and fighting, and becoming more distressed when touched or lifted. Demon possession would definitely have been on my list of things to check 400 years ago!

Re: Night terrors

[veratiny.livejournal.com]

It was the belly voice, frothing, spitting and almost super human strength that had me reaching for the yellow pages and looking up a priest! Desperate times...3am is always desperate times ;-)