Riddles – hashtag tashlan

fairytale procedural: smiley unleashes the wrecking ball

sukrat OTI — Sat, 24 May 2014 10:23:14 +0000

Robin Carmody messaged me on FB to say he’d just been reading my le carré rereads on ilx, and enjoyed and agreed with them. Since one of my projects here is I guess to begin to centralise my boringly dispersed and rhizomatic self, I thought I’d link them here. This is the original, inset in a longer ilx thread: liveblogging Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. This is the same excerpted at FT (i.e. all the rest of the entertaining ilx chatter cut away). This was intended as a liveblog of a reread of Smiley’s People, except things ran away with themselves and I ended up just posting some thoughts (on an ilx thread no one else ever contributed to).

chomolungma’s share

sukrat OTI — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 09:50:46 +0000

When I first read about Mallory and Irvine years ago — there was a plaque in a church to the latter, and I used to gaze at it as a child — I was fascinated and intrigued by the idea that two people could just vanish off the side of a mountain. The clouds came down, and when they disappeared, the climbers had disappeared too: a ghost story, really.

I’ve read enough about Everest since to get a sense of how unimagineably and breathtakingly vast it is: and now I think what strikes me, really, is that so little does actually vanish. Everything’s still there, of course; but the curious fact is that everything gets seen — it just doesn’t always get reported.

clue

sukrat OTI — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 11:30:38 +0000

I waited to go public with HT:DDD until I had an acceptable number of posts up. Acceptable basically means not divisible by 5, as I intensely disapprove of such quantities. There are other numbers I dislike but soon I’ll stop counting and it won’t matter to anyone.

riddle

sukrat OTI — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 15:27:59 +0000

“In an old house in Paris that was covered in vines
lived the BARON DE CHARLUS, in search of lost time”

I have posted this elsewhere but I am unreasonably pleased with it.