Jeffrey’s Gallimaufry 11.03.23
Be on the lookout for “hidden games”
GALLIMAUFRY, n.
“A confused jumble or medley of things.”
mid 16th century: from archaic French galimafrée ‘unappetizing dish’, perhaps from Old French galer ‘have fun’ + Picard mafrer ‘eat copious quantities’.
There’s a lot to chew on here (ha ha). I’ve always felt a bit embarrassed by this word, because it bears a slight resemblance to my full name. But honestly, this entire newsletter concept is embarrassing. I’m compelled to put my thoughts and emotions out in the world, and it feels clumsy and messy and boring and self-indulgent and juvenile and pointless. But I’ve come this far, so I might as well hold that sense of embarrassment a little tighter.
I trot out this word to mark a new experiment. After scattered and impulsive contemplation, I’ve decided to open my Friday posts back up to my full range of subscribers. It’s almost entirely selfish - I’d like more people to see what I’m writing, and at the same time I’d like to loosen up a bit and give myself more permission to try things out.
For the next few weeks, I plan to treat these Friday posts as more of an ongoing commonplace book, collecting quotations, links, images, shout-outs, and thoughts that I’ve had over the course of the week, with little regard for structure or sense. I’d like to see what happens when I free myself from coherence and intent. The result will hopefully be a sort of scrapbook, a hodgepodge, a potpourri, a salmagundi - a gallimaufry. Like so…
The book on the right just dropped this week from Astraleyez Thee Bibliomancer, a fellow Substacker who also curates a incredible Instagram feed of bizarre, esoteric, and fantastic art from his utterly gobsmacking book collection. Spell Bound, from earlier this year, was a lush collection of vintage paperback book covers of witchcraft, satanism, and the occult. (Our copy is one of the original first run of 333 copies; I believe the second run - of 666, natch - is also sold out.) The new book, The Spectral Vision of Gothic Romance, does the same thing for pictures of women running away from castles. It’s tremendous, and it looks like you can still get a copy.
While reviewing some PowerPoint slides for work yesterday, I ran across an interesting suggestion. The writer recommended supplementing corporate emails with extra context to draw attention to “hidden games.” Mystified, I googled the phrase, wracked my brains for something I might be missing, and finally threw up my hands and admitted I didn’t understand what they were getting at. Turns out they meant to write “hidden gems.” To be honest, I was a bit disappointed.
I stumbled upon this interesting little piece of weirdness at Better Read Than Dead’s monthly garage sale in Bed-Stuy - it’s a selection of 1930s newspaper columns that invited readers to solve mysteries based on a series of carefully staged photos. I haven’t had a chance to find out whodunnit, but I’ll let you know how it goes.
(That last one’s for all the 10-year-olds in the audience…)
Halloween morning found me sitting at the dining room table on a Zoom call with clients from Europe. In the middle of trying to understand some finer point about marketing language, a movement out the window caught my eye and HOLY SHIT two giant crows landed on the fence outside fighting over a dead bird’s corpse. Which is pretty much exactly what I blurted to my clients. We all had a nervous laugh before going back to our messaging updates around customer outcomes.
I can’t say I knew much about the folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie beyond her musical cred and her Native American background. But this exhaustively-reported CBC News article alleges - well, let’s be serious, makes a pretty goddamn airtight case - that the 82-year-old Sainte-Marie’s self-proclaimed Cree heritage, which has been central to her work and career, is entirely fabricated. The apparent extent and vehemence of the deception is breathtaking. I saw some pretty elaborate costumes on Halloween, but I don’t think anyone had been wearing them for 60 damn years.
From Get in Trouble, a very interesting short-story collection by Kelly Link: “Florida is California on a Troma budget.”
I had not been familiar with the author-illustrator Edward Carey until Print Magazine (no longer in print) interviewed him about his multi-month run of daily supernatural drawings. Apparently his new novel, Edith Holler, is about a haunted Victorian theater, and the book itself is essentially a toy theater that can be cut apart and played with. Who is this guy, and why didn’t anyone tell me about him sooner???
On Halloween night, we got stuck in a New Yorker short story. Dash was invited to trick or treat with a friend in Park Slope, and the kid’s moms invited us up for pizza afterward. It turns out Dash’s friend’s dad, who had picked him up earlier, accidentally locked a lock that the moms never used, for which there was no key. So all of us - me, Hope, Dash, Dash’s friend, his little brother, his two moms, and his dad - stood crammed in the hallway outside their third-floor walkup trying to figure out how to get inside. There were sweaty apologies, chilly reassurances, increasingly hungry kids, phone calls to locksmiths, and rising tensions as we all tried to act like this was normal. After about 20 minutes, an upstairs neighbor came home and offered to open the back window via fire escape. It was like a spooky escape room for socially awkward adults - the most terrifying Halloween I’ve had in years.
In addition to the Kelly Link collection above, I’m in the middle of a few books this week. This includes:
The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science, by Seb Falk - I have a long-simmering idea for a medieval story, so every few months I throw another coal on the fire to keep it warm. For all our societal progress, turns out medieval monks were way smarter than I am.
Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural, ed. Marvin Kaye - this is one of the anthologies with the great Edward Gorey covers, and I’ve been chipping away at it for a few weeks. After coming home from our haunted hallway I rang in Halloween night with Sheridan LeFanu’s pre-Dracula classic “Carmilla.” (Spoiler: She’s a vampire.)
Prague Full of Ghosts, written by Miloslav Švandrlík, with wonderful drawings by Jiří Winter Neprakta - this illustrated guide to the Czech capital’s many haunts is one of those books so perfect and so unlikely that I still can’t believe I didn’t make it up it in a dream. We found it in the kid’s section at a used bookstore - and not a moment too soon, because a surprising number of ghosts used to be vividly depicted prostitutes.
To get into the holiday spirit last weekend, we watched The House That Dripped Blood (1971, dir. Peter Duffell): As a service, I am duty bound to inform you that at no time does blood drip from any portion of the house at the center of this Amicus anthology picture. Disappointing though that might be, the picture overall is a corny hoot, featuring four more-campy-than-spooky tales featuring the usual suspects - Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Ingrid Pitt, Denholm Elliot and others - milling about in a marvelously chintzy mansion wearing undoubtedly the most spectacular selection of patterned cravats ever committed to film. Maybe I want to design spooky cravats when I grow up?
I’ll keep working on this formula next week. Any thoughts in the meantime are welcome, as I have no idea what I’m doing. Here’s a button for it: