it's been almost a year since i posted this link, which means i probably haven't updated any of the lists in the folder, and there may be some new meta writers that i haven't gotten around to including. But the idea is, here's a place to get started exploring series 4 meta (and yes, i still dream of doing earlier "semesters", but it gets harder when people leave fandom/tumblr).
My focus is more on reading the subtext, than trying to sort out "what really happened" in the surface story.
if i can figure out how to do it, i would love to make this a pinned post, since the clicky in my header stopped working last year.
ETA sept 2021, if google's new security measures interferes with the link, message me and i will see if i can get you in.
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As EVs spread in some other parts of the world, smaller vehicles like motorbikes or three-wheeled rickshaws are taking off in India. This is especially important given the high levels of air pollution in many Indian cities.
The shift is being driven primarily by cost as electric vehicles become cheaper and the cost of oil less predictable. About 70% of three-wheeled vehicles sold in India in 2025 were electric.
Image and information from this article in The Telegraph
Indigenous lands are crucial for climate mitigation and resilience. Research shows their health is a direct result of Indigenous stewardship
While this isn't news to anyone who works in this space, it is useful to have this water-is-wet research to affirm that Indigenous knowledge and land management are extremely effective at storing carbon and protecting biodiversity.
I want to draw special attention to this part of the article:
New research shows that approach overlooks the key role that Indigenous knowledge and culture can play in mitigating climate change. It also reveals a dangerous misconception that has taken hold in global climate discussions: the idea that Indigenous lands are so rich because they are remote or sparsely populated.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The health of Indigenous lands and their ability to store vast quantities of carbon stem from the stewardship of the people who inhabit them.
I'm actually bringing this back around to say another important thing.
I get a fair number of asks and comments on my posts expressing sentiments like "human beings are a plague on this Earth", "humans ruin everything, we deserve to be wiped out", "humanity is inherently selfish, evil, and irredeemable".
I don't think the folks saying these things have bad intentions, I know their words come from a place of very understandable pain, fear, and anger. But to act as though humanity's impact on nature is inherently damaging and extractive is to erase thousands of years of Indigenous stewardship of nature. These ecosystems are thriving because there are humans living there.
This is your regular reminder that you don't need to feel guilty for being a human. You are part of nature--viewing humans as inherently separate from the rest of nature is actually part of the problem. You will be so much better served redirecting that guilt into supporting the humans who are helping nature or resisting those who are hurting it.
A Tale of Three Spinsters: Dorothy L. Sayers, Unnatural Death
About halfway through Marie Benedict's novel The Queens of Crime, I went looking for more information about the May Daniels case. Benedict's novel is inspired--I use the word with reservation--by famed mystery writers and Detective Club founding member Dorothy L. Sayers's investigation of Daniels's murder. Caroline Crampton’s podcast Shedunnit devotes an episode to this case, and it is the source of the following details:
May Daniels was a twentysomething English nurse who traveled to France and disappeared from a public bathroom in Boulogne in 1926. Five months later, her body was found a few miles away. The presence nearby of a hypodermic syringe, and the fact that the soil the body lay on had been soaked in blood, fueled an inferno of media speculation. Dorothy Sayers's husband was a freelance journalist; the News of the World sent both him and Sayers to Boulogne to cover the story from their different perspectives. The hope was that while her husband reported on the official investigation, Sayers could use her experience as a mystery writer to discover the solution. She didn't. The May Daniels case remains unsolved. However, Sayers did get to use some of what she found in her third Wimsey novel in progress, Unnatural Death.
Great, I thought. I'll read Unnatural Death and that will help me survive Benedict's book. So I did. And I’m glad I did, because Unnatural Death is very entertaining, very interesting, and showcases all the things Benedict’s book fails to capture about Sayers and her writing.
Unnatural Death is not really about the May Daniels case. The novel was well underway before Sayers made the trip to Boulogne. But, Crampton argues, the novel is about what made the May Daniels case so sensational: intensifying anxiety about the increasing number of young, single, independent, unmarried and maybe never marrying women in postwar England. Benedict attempts to convey this cutural anxiety in The Queens of Crime by repeating the phrase "surplus women," which was one way the media labeled this population. Once these young single women age, of course, there's another label waiting for them: spinster.
Unnatural Death might almost be described as a fictionalized history of the unmarried English woman from Victorian times to 1927--the year Unnatural Death was published (it was published a year later in the US under the title The Dawson Pedigree). Three generations of "surplus women" are represented: Agatha Dawson, the elderly cancer patient whose death Wimsey investigates; the middle-aged Miss Climpson, who is introduced here as Wimsey's assistant and will eventually supervise an entire Wimsey-funded team of women investigators; and the twentysomething Mary Whittaker, Agatha Dawson's great-niece and maybe also her murderer. That’s not a spoiler. One of the unusual features of this novel is that from the beginning, the question isn't who did it, but did she do it, and if so why and how did she do it?
I can only do one cut tag per post, so I have to save it for the spoilers. Behind the cut tag, I will not give away the ending, but in order to say anything about what's cool about this novel I will have to give away information uncovered during the investigation. So here's some nonspoilery observations up front:
In my review of The Queens of Crime, one of the things I complained of was Benedict’s apparently total lack of interest in capturing Sayers’s voice. Unnatural Death shows how much Sayers enjoys playing with voice, and how good at it she is. Exhibit A is Miss Climpson, whose style is an amped-up parody of the middlebrow style Sayers would have encountered in women’s magazines: breathless, confidential, cliché-ridden, humble-bragging, and faux-self-effacing. Here’s Miss Climpson writing to let Wimsey know she's arrived in the murder town and set up her surveillance operation, and believe me all the italics are hers:
“My dear Lord Peter, You will be happy to hear, after my two previous bad shots (!), that I have found the right place at last. The Agatha Dawson certificate is the correct one, and the dreadful scandal about Dr. Carr is still very much alive, I am sorry to say for the sake of human nature. I have been fortunate enough to secure rooms in the very next street to Wellington Avenue, where Miss Dawson used to live. My landlady seems a very nice woman, though a terrible gossip!—which is all to the good! Her charge for a very pleasant bedroom and sitting room with full board is 3 ½ guineas weekly. I trust you will not think this too extravagant. I enclose a careful statement of my expenses up-to-date.”
Climpson’s voice is a deliberately overwritten version of the mode from which Marie Benedict's own narrative style is descended. The difference is, all this overheated banality is on purpose, and it's funny. All the characters in this novel, including the minor ones, have individualized voices, often with regional accents or dialects.
This passage shows off Sayers's ambivalence about this novel's single women. Miss Climpson's femininity may be stereotyped; but she’s smart enough and self-aware enough to trade on those very stereotypes, and for precisely that reason her investigations are at least as effective as Wimsey’s or Parker’s. Like Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Unnatural Death exploits the fact that women’s social networks are formed and sustained in part through information-sharing—or, as the less sympathetic call it, gossip.
As a novel that came out almost contemporaneously with The Well of Loneliness, Unnatural Death gives us an interesting window into how queer sexuality and gender diversity were showing up in popular fiction.
Unnatural Death includes an extremely awkward subplot involving a Black clergyman named Hallelujiah Dawson, in which Sayers does that thing where she invents minor characters who are heinously and intentionally racist in order to make her favorite characters look enlightened. All the same, Parker drops the n-word casually, and Wimsey’s commentary on Hallelujiah and his misfortunes hasn’t aged well. This subplot is not, however, totally gratuitous; and I will talk about it briefly behind the cut tag.
Unnatural Death has a great plot, which I will unavoidably be revealing some of. So if you like Sayers, and you hate spoilers, and you haven’t read this novel, you should go read it before you go behind this cut tag. I don’t want to spoil anyone's fun.
And I guess this is my last pre-spoiler point: Things like that passage from Miss Climpson up there? The many twists and turns of the plot I'm about to discuss? Absurd amounts of time spent trying to extract a tiny nugget of information from garrulous villagers? The endless eccentricites of everyone from Lord Peter Wimsey to Miss Climpson's landlady?This is the kind of thing contemporary readers have been taught to see as extraneous, unnecessary stuff that should be removed from fiction so we can read it faster. But this "extra" stuff is where the pleasure of reading lies. That's where all the flavor is. That's why I read Unnatural Death twice in quick succession whereas I could barely drag myself through The Queens of Crime once.
And now, the spoilers, behind the cut tag.
There are a lot of coincidences in Unnatural Death, starting with Wimsey and Parker happening to be dining out and talking shop next to a table occupied by a doctor who recently caused himself all kinds of trouble by refusing to certify a patient's death without an autopsy. The patient was Agatha Dawson. In addition to being elderly, she was also a terminal cancer patient, with maybe a few months left to live when she was found dead one morning. There were no obvious signs of foul play, but from some details the doctor learned from Agatha's nurse and her remaning servants, the doctor who'd been treating her had misgivings. Her great-niece, a young single woman named Mary Whittaker, had been living with and caring for Agatha for years, on the understanding that the unmarried and childless Agatha would leave Mary her fortune. True, Agatha refused to make a will because of her terror of death; but Mary was her closest living relative. Agatha didn't see the point of making out a will when her estate would automatically go to Mary anyway. The autopsy identifies the cause of death as heart failure, but there's no evidence of what might have caused her heart to fail. Still with misgivings, the doctor eventually signs Agatha Dawson's death certificate--though not before Mary Whittaker has turned the whole town against the doctor for causing her and her poor old great aunt Agatha all this trouble. Mary Whittaker does in fact inherit Agatha's fortune, and everyone appears to have moved on.
But as soon as Wimsey hears the doctor's story, he HAS to investigate--despite the fact that the doctor himself doesn't want more attention drawn to his professional disaster. Parker, at one point, asks Wimsey what is it about this case that gets to him so. Wimsey replies that he's long been haunted by the idea that most murderers do in fact get away with it. We detectives, he says, only see the failures. As soon as you NOTICE that a murder is a murder, that murderer has failed. For each of these failures, Wimsey posits, there must be a hundred murders that are never solved because they are never recognized as murders. His absolute conviction that murder was done is something he has a hard time getting people to share. But he seems to understand, as Miss Climpson also does, that he's living in a providential universe. Wimsey and Climpson are both very observant Anglicans, and one of the big breaks in this case comes as a result of Miss Climpson regularly attending the local church even while she's on a case. The Detective Club and the Detective Club Oath are still in the future at this point; and while Sayers does eschew mumbo-jumbo and jiggery-pokery, she's not above bringing in the occasional Act of God.
So as Wimsey, Climpson, and Parker start digging their own excavations, we get more and more circumstantial evidence that in fact something was fishy about Agatha Dawson's death. Wimsey's convinced that the will, or lack thereof, is at the core of all this, and that means digging into the family history. And that's where it gets interesting.
Down at the local pub in the town where Agatha lived for most of her adult life, Wimsey and Parker find out that Agatha, while unmarried, was not exactly single. She was obviously--to me, and I think to most of the characters who talk about her--the lover and life partner of Clara Whittaker, Mary's other grand-aunt. (Mary's grandfather, Clara's brother, married Agatha's sister, so Mary is the grand-niece of both Agatha and Clara.) Here's what Mrs. Piggin, the landlady at the Fox and Hounds, has to say about the young Clara Whittaker:
"But there, we can't be all alike, can we, sir? --and Miss Whittaker was altogether out of the way. They don't make them like that nowadays. Not but what these modern girls are good goers, many of them, and does a lot of things as would have been thought very fast in the old days, but Miss Whittaker had the knowledge as well. Bought her own horses and physicked 'em and bred 'em, and needed no advice from anybody."
Clara, after leaving school, started her own horse breeding/trading business, was cut off by her family, and moved in with her school friend Agatha Dawson. Here's Sayers's description of an old photograph of the two of them taken during one of the hunts Clara Whittaker used to organize:
"Lord Peter and Parker looked with considerable interest at the rather grim old woman sitting so uncompromisingly upright with the reins in her hand. A dour, weather-beaten old face, but certainly handsome still, with its large nose and straight, heavy eyebrows. And beside her, smaller, plumper, and more feminine, was the Agatha Dawson whose curious death had led them to this quiet country place. She had a sweet, smiling face--less dominating than that of her redoubtable friend, but full of spirit and character. Without doubt they had been a remarkable pair of old ladies."
Without doubt. And if you think Sayers is being overly coy by substituting "remarkable" for "queer" or "ladies" for "lesbians," well, consider what Ben Cobling, the 87-year-old former stable master who managed Clara's horses, has to say about her:
"A rare young lady she was in them days. Deary me. Straight as a switch, with a fine, high colour in her cheeks and shiny black hair--just like a beautiful two-year filly she was. And very sperrited. Wonnerful sperrited. There was a many a gentlemen as would have been glad to hitch up with her, but she was never broke to harness. Like dirt, she treated 'em. Wouldn't look at 'em, except it might be the grooms and stable-hands in a matter of 'osses. And in the way of business, of course. Well, there is some creatures like that. I 'ad a terrier-bitch that way. Great ratter she was. But a business woman--nothin' else. I tried 'er with all the dogs I could lay 'and to, but it weren't no good. Bloodshed there was an' sich a row--you never 'eard. The Lord makes a few on 'em that way to suit 'Is own purposes, I suppose."
So, not to harp on the whole Marie Benedict thing, but...if you are afraid to let your characters use an unnecessary word, you don't get this kind of complexity. Cobling obviously has tremendous affection and admiration for Clara Whittaker as someone who cared deeply and knew much about the thing he cares about most, which is horses. In commenting on her antipathy toward men, he analogizes her to a "terrier-bitch" of his acquaintance, which on the face of it seems pretty insulting. But animals are as important to Cobling as people, if not more so--he's told Wimsey that he feels like the horses his father handled were more or less his family--and he brings the dog in as a way of getting to what was obviously his final opinion on the matter of his boss's sexuality: some "females" are just made that way, to serve one of God's inscrutable purposes. You can still hear the lesbian-as-man-hater BS underneath this paragraph, but you can also hear appreciation for a woman who was "never broke to harness." This conversation, by the way, is happening in a chapter titled "A Tale of Two Spinsters."
This is what I mean about the ambivalence. Dorothy Sayers's contemporaries and biographers often comment on her masculine clothes and her general discomfort with normative femininity. When it came to sexuality, Sayers followed her own rules. Having refused to have sex with her lover John Cournos without marriage, she got pregnant after he left her, by a man who by all accounts she cared much less about, and then gave the baby to her cousin Iris to raise. (This is the background out of which Harriet Vane and her case arise in Strong Poison, the next novel in the series.) It's striking that all these Ordinary English People are staunch admirers of Clara and approve of Agatha's devotion to her. It's also striking that Sayers leaves their love story coded...but really just barely. Is this just Sayers anticipating the firestorm that Radclyffe Hall will set off with a story about another genderqueer daughter of the aristocracy in The Well of Loneliness, and providing herself with a veneer of deniability? Maybe. I'm not an intentionalist.
I will say that I'm very interested by the contrast between how the novel represents the queer women of two generations ago and the way it represents the queer women of the (at the time) here and now. Miss Climpson, on her first meeting with Mary Whittaker, notes a lot of the same features that set Clara apart, but sees them in a more sinister light:
"The first impression which Miss Climpson got of Mary Whittaker was that she was totally out of place among the tea-tables of S. Onesimus. With her handsome, strongly-marked features and quiet air of authority, she was of the type that 'does well' in City offices. She had a pleasant and self-possessed manner, and was beautifully tailored--not mannishly, and yet with a severe fineness of outline that negatived the appeal of a beautiful figure."
Something about Mary Whittaker reminds Miss Climpson of something she's observed in "her long and melancholy experience of frustrated womanhood, observed in a dreary succession of cheap boarding-houses," but she can't put her finger on it until she sees Mary with her friend Vera Findlater, who is "fair and bobbed and rather coltish"...and completely besotted with Mary. Climpson realizes both that Mary and Vera are lovers and that the relationship is uneven. She imagines Mary being contemptuous of Vera's devotion and referring to it as "schwarmerei"--a German word that I have encountered only one other novel in English: Kate O'Brien's tragically underrated novel The Land of Spices, where the nuns use it to refer to the crushes their girl students have on each other. Somewhere along the "woman-ridden" life Miss Climpson has led, she learned to recgonize lesbian desire.
She's absolutely right; Vera's devotion to Mary will become more and more important to the plot--and more and more tragically misguided, because Mary Whittaker is a really nasty piece of work. To go into details would really be too much of a spoiler, but let me just say two things: she is absolutely ruthless about protecting herself, and she is very, very dangerous to the women who cross her path. Hallelujiah Dawson may have been introduced partly for comic relief or for the sake of filling out the legal plot or, what the hell, gratuitously referencing the Tichbourne Claimant; but once Mary finds out about him she makes things deadly serious. More than once, Mary tries to frame Black men for her own crimes; and this is one of the ways we know that she is Bad News.
So what do we make of this tale of three spinsters? Whatever it is, it's complicated. It leaves a lot of room for interpretation. And this is why I've spent all this time writing about it. I might point out that the entire plot hinges on the fact that Mary feels entitled to inherit, without lifting a finger, everything that her pioneering great aunt Clara earned. Is this plot partly about resenting the "surplus women" of the 1920s for parasitically benefiting from the struggles of their New Women foremothers without actually contributing to the struggle? Maybe, maybe not. I will tell you one thing, though: we are learning a lot more about life for women in the 1920s from Unnatural Death than we learn from The Queens of Crime.
All right. I said I was over it. I resume.
In the meantime, there is much in Unnatural Death to enjoy arguing about, including the most in-depth portrait we probably ever get of Miss Climpson. I know Harriet Vane eventually eclipses her; but I was honestly impressed with Miss Climpson as a detective, despite the friction I often felt when up against her point of view. I hope to have avoided enough spoilers to still make reading it worthwhile.
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Say you break your ankle. You could know everything there is to know intellectually about the injury. Even with this vast knowledge, you will still experience physical pain.
Now take this logic and apply it to things like ADHD, autism, clinical depression, and other less visible/divergent disabilities. You cannot think your way out of feeling.
That is to say: you are not a bad, lazy, or selfish person for struggling, even if you know why you are struggling.
many women are excited to get old and weird, but i have great news that it's fully possible to become weird now, before you get old. just imagine the heights of weirdness you will be able to reach in fifty years if you get started now. that's what I think
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The concept that married people live longer is interesting. I'm sure there is some merit to the idea that if you're married there is someone there to nag you about going to the doctor, but I think much larger factors are having the finances of dual incomes and access to an immediate support person.
Surgeries require having a designated person to look after you. Many injuries require driving to somewhere like an emergency room which can be hard to do if you are the one injured. If you're home with the flu, it's hard to tell when it's bad enough to go to the hospital without another person checking on you. And if you pass out it requires another person to find you like that to get medical aid.
You can prop it up as the benefits of marriage, but I think there's a much deeper discussion to be had about how we've built society around marriage as an inevitable conclusion and neglected to build support systems that function outside of romantic pairings.
thinking about this further, people often cite this as a sort of See It's Better To Be Married and mostly accept it as a fact that being married is better for you overall and proceed to breakdown why marriage leads to longer lives. Instead I think we need to be looking at why the system is failing single people and what we could do to close that gap. What structural societal changes can we make to help single people rather than treat it as a Well Obviously foregone conclusion that everyone will eventually pair up.
It's not Why Are Married People Healthier? It's Why Aren't Single People as Healthy? And then actually examine the causes rather than hand waving it away with whichever stereotype of being single or half remembered memory of the last time you were single in your early 20s.
I think it's also important to note that men benefit more than women in the marriage longevity statistics. More in depth discussion of that phenomenon in the link above.
Reef-building coral polyps constantly stir the water around them with dense carpets of microscopic hair-like cilia. The beating of the cilia helps polyps feed while also pushing away sediment and debris. (Image and research credit: S. Selvan et al.; via APS)
Oregon has not recorded a confirmed pesticide-related bee kill since 2020. Oregon State University researchers discuss the education, resear
In 2013, Oregon created the Task Force on Pollinator Health to address pollinator deaths due to pesticides. The task force included public education as well as training 13,000 licensed pesticide applicators on how to avoid practices that are high risk to pollinators.
Since 2020, the state has not had any verified pesticide-related bee deaths and the state has a 10% lower rate of commercial beehive losses than the national average.
I love the complete and utter walking contradiction that is Doctor and Captain John H. Watson.
He's got anger issues, and he's kind and warm. He's got trust issues, and he's loyal and caring. He's sarcastic and stubborn, and he's self-sacrifcing and patient. He's so tired, and he'll run head first into danger because he loves the adventure. He's so soft, and he's so bruised. He's a crackshot of a marksman, and he runs like a puppy and types like a chicken. He's Sherlock's grounding anchor, and he's Sherlock's enabler and partner in crime solving. He's so repressed, and he feels so much.
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the problem with tumblr spells is all of you lil sluts are casting and not giving it time to charge so you're all casting cantrips and not 9th level death spells. everyone wants to be the one to take them down no one wants to be the one who assists
