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truepennyPrevious DLS posts: Concerning Lord Peter Wimsey, the Hon. Freddy Arbuthnot, Miss Katharine Alexandra Climpson, Whose Body?, Clouds of Witness, Unnatural Death, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club 1, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club 2, Strong Poison, The Five Red Herrings, Have His Carcase 1, Have His Carcase 2, Have His Carcase 3, Have His Carcase 4, Have His Carcase 5, Have His Carcase 6.
Last post on Have His Carcase. Chapter 28 to the end. Spoilers.
I have a complete and idiotic weakness for "The Evidence of the Cipher" and "The Evidence of the Letter." In terms of my ongoing thematic whatsits, I would like to point out that this is the longest and most amiable scene Peter and Harriet have together. Both of them forget their various roles and are united in the excitement and pleasure of their problem-solving. Sayers points this out:
It is an interlude in which they can forget their discomfort with each other and the thorny nature of their respective relationship roles.
It is also, of course, chock-full of metatextuality. I think "The Evidence of the Cipher" was what first made me notice the metatextuality of HHC. Because Sayers goes ahead and spells out the process of cracking the cipher, in this veristic rather than simply genre mystery way. The book turns for the space of several pages into one of Lewis Carroll's mathematical games texts. I find it entertaining in very much the same way I find "The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager's Will" entertaining. The letter itself, when decoded, even more aggressively foregrounds the metatextual element:
The letter, itself a textual object, marks the point of greatest intermeshing of fiction and reality within the text of Have His Carcase. It looks like something out of a detective story, Harriet says: a fiction. Which it is, but the plot which it is an artifact of is a real plot (within the fictional world of HHC) which results in a real murder. It shows us Alexis's inability to distinguish fiction from reality, and by linking back to the Ruritanian romances* of which he is so fond, it demonstrates him to be an uncritical and naive reader of both fiction and reality. The advantage here lies with the critical reader, represented here by Peter and Harriet, who can identify the intrusion of fictional elements into real life--i.e., what Harriet and Peter have been doing all along with their obsessive allusions to detective novels. Like Alexis, they are conducting themselves as if they were (as they in fact are) characters in a novel, but they have correctly identified their genre and their place within it. Alexis fatally misreads, both his genre and his role--and I have inspired myself to quote what Cantrip says in The Sirens Sang of Murder:
Alexis behaves with misplaced confidence of his own status of hero and gets murdered for it. Moreover, his chosen genre is not one which encourages the close scrutiny of narratives for plausibility and susceptibility of proof. Detective story readers are (as more than one person has pointed out) also detectives, and that role will get you farther than merely being a "hero."
The question of narratives under scrutiny comes up again immediately after Peter departs the boarding house. His further investigation into the matter of the Morgan imparts a new spin to the whole question of narratives and story-telling, as we revisit a story we thought we knew, only to discover that its import is exactly the opposite of what we thought it was. Mr. Polwhistle and Tom don't buttress Henry Weldon's innocence; when their story is properly examined, it makes Henry look even more suspicious than before. This will be a motif with the various aspects of Henry's story; when the story is revisited, it is proven to be a different story--a process which also highlights the importance of asking the right questions, another thing Alexis signally failed to do.
And if the letter is the moment of greatest metatextuality, then the end of the chapter signals the moment of greatest generic self-awareness: "Another thing seemed certain, too: that every theory Wimsey had so far formed about the case was utterly and madly wide of the mark" (HHC 389). This book, as I have said before, is ALL ABOUT the forming of theories, as Peter, Harriet, Umpelty, Glaisher, and Ormond each have a go at proposing a narrative of Alexis's death. And this, if I may digress for a moment, may explain something I've been wondering about a little: why is Harriet reading Tristram Shandy in the first chapter? Since Tristram Shandy is a compendium of narratives proposed, abandoned, unfinished, everted, it may in fact be a metatextual comment on the fate of narratives in HHC. Okay. Digression finished. Standard practice in Wimsey mysteries is not to have a mad plethora of theories, all of them disproven, especially not with Peter as propounder. In general, the story is single, and the novel is the record of Peter putting that story together from the fragments left after the crime. The only other Sayers book that has so many theories in it is The Five Red Herrings, and that, too, leads to a strikingly metatextual moment, the exact opposite of this one:
T5RH is Peter's apotheosis as the series detective; HHC is the ironic deconstruction of that apotheosis.
It is probably no accident that we move from Peter's ironic epiphany to Bunter, who is steadfastly on the trail of that single strand. I adore Bunter, but I'm not sure I have anything to say about him. (Although note that Bright is reading an Edgar Wallace novel.) His chapter is similar in its patient verism to "The Evidence of the Cipher": Sayers could have simply left this out and let Bunter report back to Peter, as he does at various other points in the canon, including earlier in HHC (pp. 292-4). And I certainly wouldn't try to argue that this is a realistic representation of what is involved in tailing a man. But it does follow through on the details of the process as it works in a detective novel of this sort.
I think I forgot to mention earlier in this series of posts (and if I did remember it won't hurt to bring it up again) the way in which Peter and Harriet simply assume, on almost no evidence, that this thing that looks like a suicide is actually a murder--and then comment on their own assumption. You could almost say they make their narrative into a mystery by sheer force of will. That issue is still alive and kicking here at the end: "since we have devoted a great deal of time and thought to the case on the assumption that it was a murder, it's a convenience to know that the assumption is probably correct" (HHC 399). We deconstruct and lay out the various pieces of Henry Weldon's alibi and Bright/Morecambe's story, and then proceed to the matter of Alexis's own personal fiction, embodied in the family tree he drew for Leila Garland, and which she squirreled away in a novel (The Girl who gave All) of a rather similar flavor to Alexis's preferred narrative style.
(Another side note, relevant to an earlier post. I talked about the lack of community among women in this novel, particularly inter-generationally, and it shows up again in spades here: "He was always worrying over that Charlotte-person--horrid old wretch she must have been, too. Why, she was forty-five if she was a day, and then she went and had a baby. I wonder it didn't kill her. It ought to have, I'm sure" (HHC 419-20). Women see each other only as competitors in the world of Wilvercombe.)
Peter is rather taken with Alexis's narrative (another subliminal hint of doubling between them) and suggests that Alexis should have been an author--that he should have concentrated on telling stories rather than attempting to participate in them.
Mrs. Morecambe does a neat job of reinterpreting the narrative of Henry Weldon, revising it right out of existence as far as she herself is concerned, only to have her work undone by the fact that Morecambe ultimately spun more stories than he could control. Mrs. Sterne (another reference to Tristram Shandy and Mr. Sullivan are irruptions from other stories, marked by names: Field, Maurice Vavasour. Morecambe's mistake lay in trying to construct narratives with real people.
And then the final stubborn pursuit of the truth: "Evidence of What Should Have Happened" and "Evidence of What Did Happen." We begin with the final and strongest commentary on series detectives as tropes of their genre:
And then, from a chance comment--the most absolutely random and uncontrollable factor--the murder is solved. Not by any of these "methods" (and it's interesting that neither Harriet nor Peter adduces Robert Templeton's methods; I hope that's because he's a good enough detective, and Harriet's a good enough writer, that he doesn't have one) and almost despite all of the detective work Harriet and Peter have done through this whole long book.
Peter's solution is at first presented as fiction: "Let's pretend we've planned this murder ourselves and have timed it for twelve o'clock, shall we?" (HHC 432). He tells it as a story. And then, for the last time, fiction and reality trade places again. All these other theories turn out to be fiction; Peter's "fiction" is true. And it's marked by a wordgame. (Here, a moment of autobiography: one reason that I had to get rid of my HarperPaperbacks edition of HHC was that it insisted on spelling the disease "hemophilia," despite the necessity of it being "haemophilia" for Peter's acrostic to work. *snarl*) This echoes back to the cipher and Peter's doggerels and in general the self-awareness of character and text. Detective fiction is a game, even if it is not always ludic.
The question of plausibility in narrative is Umpelty's exit line, as he despairs of ever making the Chief Constable--much less a jury--believe the novel's narrative (HHC 447). And Peter and Harriet depart from the book, from Wilvercombe, from this foray into mannered, metatextual genre meditation, and return to London. The novel ends hard upon the solution of the murder, emphasizing again that its purpose, first to last, has been concerned with the generics of detective fiction.
HHC is a metatexual detective novel, commenting on itself and on its genre. There's a bunch of other stuff going on, too, as I've tried to point out, but for me, the main thing about this novel, and the reason I am so very fond of it, is that it's DLS's exploration of the tropes and conventions of the genre she works in. I think this is necessary groundwork for The Nine Tailors and Gaudy Night; their transcendence of their genre is made possible by the meditation upon that genre textualized by Have His Carcase.
---
* Is there any possibility that this is a veiled reference to The Prisoner of Zenda? It's been so long since I read it that I don't have a good feel myself, and I'm not sure it's "Ruritanian," but the idea is intriguing in light of my other theory about Alexis as a double for Peter.
I think I'm going to save the music and media posts to use as a buffer zone between Murder Must Advertise and The Nine Tailors. So my next Sayers post will be on Murder Must Advertise.
---
WORKS CITED
Caudwell, Sarah. The Sirens Sang of Murder. 1989. New York: Dell Publishing, 1990.
Sayers, Dorothy L. The Five Red Herrings. 1931. New York: Perennial Library-Harper & Row, Publishers, 1986.
---. Have His Carcase. 1932. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, n.d.
Last post on Have His Carcase. Chapter 28 to the end. Spoilers.
I have a complete and idiotic weakness for "The Evidence of the Cipher" and "The Evidence of the Letter." In terms of my ongoing thematic whatsits, I would like to point out that this is the longest and most amiable scene Peter and Harriet have together. Both of them forget their various roles and are united in the excitement and pleasure of their problem-solving. Sayers points this out:
"Do you realise that it's nearly tea-time and we haven't had any lunch?"
"Time passes when one is pleasantly occupied," said Harriet, sententiously.
Wimsey put his hat and papers down on the table, opened his mouth to speak, changed his mind, took up his belongings again and marched to the door.
"Cheerio!" he said, amiably.
(HHC 384-5)
It is an interlude in which they can forget their discomfort with each other and the thorny nature of their respective relationship roles.
It is also, of course, chock-full of metatextuality. I think "The Evidence of the Cipher" was what first made me notice the metatextuality of HHC. Because Sayers goes ahead and spells out the process of cracking the cipher, in this veristic rather than simply genre mystery way. The book turns for the space of several pages into one of Lewis Carroll's mathematical games texts. I find it entertaining in very much the same way I find "The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager's Will" entertaining. The letter itself, when decoded, even more aggressively foregrounds the metatextual element:
"What about this letter? Is it genuine? ... if it really comes from a foreign gentleman of the name of Boris, why is it written in English? Surely Russian would be safer and more likely, if Boris was really a Russian imperialist. Then again--all that opening stuff about brutal Soviets and Holy Russia is so vague and sketchy. Does it look like the letter of a serious conspirator doing a real job of work? ... It doesn't ring true. It doesn't look like business. It looks like somebody with a very sketchy idea of the way revolutions really work, trying to flatter that poor boob's monomania about his birth."
"I'll tell you what it does look like," said Harriet. "It's like the kind of thing I should put in a detective story if I didn't know a thing about Russia and didn't care much, and only wanted to give a general idea that somebody was a conspirator."
"That's it!" said Wimsey. "You're absolutely right. It might have come straight out of one of those Ruritanian romances that Alexis was so fond of."
"Of course--and now we know why he was fond of them. No wonder! They were all part of the mania. I suppose we ought to have guessed."
(HHC 383-4)
The letter, itself a textual object, marks the point of greatest intermeshing of fiction and reality within the text of Have His Carcase. It looks like something out of a detective story, Harriet says: a fiction. Which it is, but the plot which it is an artifact of is a real plot (within the fictional world of HHC) which results in a real murder. It shows us Alexis's inability to distinguish fiction from reality, and by linking back to the Ruritanian romances* of which he is so fond, it demonstrates him to be an uncritical and naive reader of both fiction and reality. The advantage here lies with the critical reader, represented here by Peter and Harriet, who can identify the intrusion of fictional elements into real life--i.e., what Harriet and Peter have been doing all along with their obsessive allusions to detective novels. Like Alexis, they are conducting themselves as if they were (as they in fact are) characters in a novel, but they have correctly identified their genre and their place within it. Alexis fatally misreads, both his genre and his role--and I have inspired myself to quote what Cantrip says in The Sirens Sang of Murder:
The trouble with real life is that you don't know whether you're the hero or just some nice chap who gets bumped off in chapter five to show what a rotter the villain is without anyone minding too much.
(TSSoM 173)
Alexis behaves with misplaced confidence of his own status of hero and gets murdered for it. Moreover, his chosen genre is not one which encourages the close scrutiny of narratives for plausibility and susceptibility of proof. Detective story readers are (as more than one person has pointed out) also detectives, and that role will get you farther than merely being a "hero."
The question of narratives under scrutiny comes up again immediately after Peter departs the boarding house. His further investigation into the matter of the Morgan imparts a new spin to the whole question of narratives and story-telling, as we revisit a story we thought we knew, only to discover that its import is exactly the opposite of what we thought it was. Mr. Polwhistle and Tom don't buttress Henry Weldon's innocence; when their story is properly examined, it makes Henry look even more suspicious than before. This will be a motif with the various aspects of Henry's story; when the story is revisited, it is proven to be a different story--a process which also highlights the importance of asking the right questions, another thing Alexis signally failed to do.
And if the letter is the moment of greatest metatextuality, then the end of the chapter signals the moment of greatest generic self-awareness: "Another thing seemed certain, too: that every theory Wimsey had so far formed about the case was utterly and madly wide of the mark" (HHC 389). This book, as I have said before, is ALL ABOUT the forming of theories, as Peter, Harriet, Umpelty, Glaisher, and Ormond each have a go at proposing a narrative of Alexis's death. And this, if I may digress for a moment, may explain something I've been wondering about a little: why is Harriet reading Tristram Shandy in the first chapter? Since Tristram Shandy is a compendium of narratives proposed, abandoned, unfinished, everted, it may in fact be a metatextual comment on the fate of narratives in HHC. Okay. Digression finished. Standard practice in Wimsey mysteries is not to have a mad plethora of theories, all of them disproven, especially not with Peter as propounder. In general, the story is single, and the novel is the record of Peter putting that story together from the fragments left after the crime. The only other Sayers book that has so many theories in it is The Five Red Herrings, and that, too, leads to a strikingly metatextual moment, the exact opposite of this one:
"This," said Lord Peter Wimsey, "is the proudest moment of my life. At last I really feel like Sherlock Holmes. A Chief Constable, a Police Inspector, a Police Sergeant, and two constables have appealed to me to decide between their theories, and with my chest puffed like a pouter-pigeon, I can lean back in my chair and say, 'Gentlemen, you are all wrong.'"
(T5RH 273)
T5RH is Peter's apotheosis as the series detective; HHC is the ironic deconstruction of that apotheosis.
It is probably no accident that we move from Peter's ironic epiphany to Bunter, who is steadfastly on the trail of that single strand. I adore Bunter, but I'm not sure I have anything to say about him. (Although note that Bright is reading an Edgar Wallace novel.) His chapter is similar in its patient verism to "The Evidence of the Cipher": Sayers could have simply left this out and let Bunter report back to Peter, as he does at various other points in the canon, including earlier in HHC (pp. 292-4). And I certainly wouldn't try to argue that this is a realistic representation of what is involved in tailing a man. But it does follow through on the details of the process as it works in a detective novel of this sort.
I think I forgot to mention earlier in this series of posts (and if I did remember it won't hurt to bring it up again) the way in which Peter and Harriet simply assume, on almost no evidence, that this thing that looks like a suicide is actually a murder--and then comment on their own assumption. You could almost say they make their narrative into a mystery by sheer force of will. That issue is still alive and kicking here at the end: "since we have devoted a great deal of time and thought to the case on the assumption that it was a murder, it's a convenience to know that the assumption is probably correct" (HHC 399). We deconstruct and lay out the various pieces of Henry Weldon's alibi and Bright/Morecambe's story, and then proceed to the matter of Alexis's own personal fiction, embodied in the family tree he drew for Leila Garland, and which she squirreled away in a novel (The Girl who gave All) of a rather similar flavor to Alexis's preferred narrative style.
(Another side note, relevant to an earlier post. I talked about the lack of community among women in this novel, particularly inter-generationally, and it shows up again in spades here: "He was always worrying over that Charlotte-person--horrid old wretch she must have been, too. Why, she was forty-five if she was a day, and then she went and had a baby. I wonder it didn't kill her. It ought to have, I'm sure" (HHC 419-20). Women see each other only as competitors in the world of Wilvercombe.)
Peter is rather taken with Alexis's narrative (another subliminal hint of doubling between them) and suggests that Alexis should have been an author--that he should have concentrated on telling stories rather than attempting to participate in them.
Mrs. Morecambe does a neat job of reinterpreting the narrative of Henry Weldon, revising it right out of existence as far as she herself is concerned, only to have her work undone by the fact that Morecambe ultimately spun more stories than he could control. Mrs. Sterne (another reference to Tristram Shandy and Mr. Sullivan are irruptions from other stories, marked by names: Field, Maurice Vavasour. Morecambe's mistake lay in trying to construct narratives with real people.
And then the final stubborn pursuit of the truth: "Evidence of What Should Have Happened" and "Evidence of What Did Happen." We begin with the final and strongest commentary on series detectives as tropes of their genre:
"Harriet! It's your business to work out problems of this sort--how do you propose to tackle this one?"
"I don't know," said Harriet. "I can only suggest a few methods and precedents. There's the Roger Sheringham method, for instance. You prove elaborately and in detail that A did the murder; then you give the story one final shake, twist it round a fresh corner, and find that the real murderer is B--the person you suspected first and then lost sight of."
"That's no good; the cases aren't parallel. We can't even plausibly fix anything on A, let alone B."
"No; well, there's the Philo Vance method. You shake your head and say: 'There's worse yet to come,' and then the murderer kills five more people, and that thins the suspects out a bit and you spot who it is."
"Wasteful, wasteful," said Wimsey. "And too slow."
"True. There's the Inspector French method--you break the unbreakable alibi."
Wimsey groaned.
"If anybody says 'Alibi' to me again, I'll--I'll--"
"All right. There are plenty of methods left. There's the Thorndyke type of solution, which, as Thorndyke himself says, can be put in a nut-shell. 'You have got the wrong man, you have got the wrong box, and you have got the wrong body.'"
(HHC 431)
And then, from a chance comment--the most absolutely random and uncontrollable factor--the murder is solved. Not by any of these "methods" (and it's interesting that neither Harriet nor Peter adduces Robert Templeton's methods; I hope that's because he's a good enough detective, and Harriet's a good enough writer, that he doesn't have one) and almost despite all of the detective work Harriet and Peter have done through this whole long book.
Peter's solution is at first presented as fiction: "Let's pretend we've planned this murder ourselves and have timed it for twelve o'clock, shall we?" (HHC 432). He tells it as a story. And then, for the last time, fiction and reality trade places again. All these other theories turn out to be fiction; Peter's "fiction" is true. And it's marked by a wordgame. (Here, a moment of autobiography: one reason that I had to get rid of my HarperPaperbacks edition of HHC was that it insisted on spelling the disease "hemophilia," despite the necessity of it being "haemophilia" for Peter's acrostic to work. *snarl*) This echoes back to the cipher and Peter's doggerels and in general the self-awareness of character and text. Detective fiction is a game, even if it is not always ludic.
The question of plausibility in narrative is Umpelty's exit line, as he despairs of ever making the Chief Constable--much less a jury--believe the novel's narrative (HHC 447). And Peter and Harriet depart from the book, from Wilvercombe, from this foray into mannered, metatextual genre meditation, and return to London. The novel ends hard upon the solution of the murder, emphasizing again that its purpose, first to last, has been concerned with the generics of detective fiction.
HHC is a metatexual detective novel, commenting on itself and on its genre. There's a bunch of other stuff going on, too, as I've tried to point out, but for me, the main thing about this novel, and the reason I am so very fond of it, is that it's DLS's exploration of the tropes and conventions of the genre she works in. I think this is necessary groundwork for The Nine Tailors and Gaudy Night; their transcendence of their genre is made possible by the meditation upon that genre textualized by Have His Carcase.
---
* Is there any possibility that this is a veiled reference to The Prisoner of Zenda? It's been so long since I read it that I don't have a good feel myself, and I'm not sure it's "Ruritanian," but the idea is intriguing in light of my other theory about Alexis as a double for Peter.
I think I'm going to save the music and media posts to use as a buffer zone between Murder Must Advertise and The Nine Tailors. So my next Sayers post will be on Murder Must Advertise.
---
WORKS CITED
Caudwell, Sarah. The Sirens Sang of Murder. 1989. New York: Dell Publishing, 1990.
Sayers, Dorothy L. The Five Red Herrings. 1931. New York: Perennial Library-Harper & Row, Publishers, 1986.
---. Have His Carcase. 1932. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, n.d.
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no subject
Date: 2003-05-17 04:03 pm (UTC)TPoZ is yet another of my fave guilty pleasures, along with the Scarlet Pimpernel series and... and... okay, okay, I'll take my lumps for this -- ALW musicals, including Cats but excluding Phantom of the Opera because the music is so incredibly crappy and I effing loathe Sarah Brightman.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-18 10:01 am (UTC)I seem to have been having a problem in the last 24 hours or so with leaving out important bits of pop culture references (see the slight tizzwoz over Scarlett O'Hara (http://www.livejournal.com/users/truepenny/96910.html)). I don't care if you like the musicals; what I mean was that people who worship at the shrine of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Genius Auteur, would very likely be offended by what I had to say about Cats. (I know that's not what I said: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.)
I had a large and brightly colored Thing for Phantom when I was in college, and then suddenly I hit saturation point and it was all over. I still think Jesus Christ Superstar is fairly brilliant--also edgy, sarcastic, and innovative, all of which are qualities ALW has seemingly ceased to be interested in. *sigh*
And thank you for the information re: TPoZ. Now I have to figure out how that fits into the context of HHC. *ponder*
no subject
Date: 2003-05-31 09:06 pm (UTC)it holds up really well and it amazes me how i can go a decade without listening to it and then remember enough of it to basically sing it cover to cover. amazes or frightens--i get those two confused sometimes.
i am really enjoying these analyses, by the way.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-17 04:22 pm (UTC)Oh, bliss! Me too... I have been reading all your HHC posts with great care and enjoyment, but haven't really posted because I had nothing to say except "me too", or "how true!" or "oiseaux=birds" or such pointless marginal comments. But I'm so pleased because I didn't think anyone else liked the Cipher chapter, and I do. Very much. It is kind of Carrollian, except that he was inclined to lecture, and Harriet and Peter are just having a very good time.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-18 05:24 pm (UTC)And I'm glad you're enjoying the posts.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-19 04:32 am (UTC)I also loved Tristram Shandy, though I think it fits into the large category of "books I enjoyed much more at age 40 than I would have at age 20." Some of us are slow maturers. :) But I agree that it might have been a metatextural comment, even if an unconscious one. (Literally unconscious, from Harriet's POV.)
Erica
knowing you're in a novel
Date: 2003-05-17 04:31 pm (UTC)I've been really enjoying your comments by the way.
Re: knowing you're in a novel
Date: 2003-05-18 05:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-05-17 05:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-05-18 05:23 pm (UTC)I think the parallel between Miss Climpson and Peter that you suggest is an interesting one (again, as with
Am I making sense?
no subject
Date: 2003-05-18 01:09 am (UTC)To make her fall asleep. *ducks*
(Here, a moment of autobiography: one reason that I had to get rid of my HarperPaperbacks edition of HHC was that it insisted on spelling the disease "hemophilia," despite the necessity of it being "haemophilia" for Peter's acrostic to work. *snarl*)
*caustic swearing* That's the sort of offense that makes me turn books into missiles.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-18 05:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-01 04:40 pm (UTC)Your quote about turning books into missiles reminded me of Dorothy Parker's quote:
"This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be flung with great force."
a thought on MMA
Date: 2003-05-19 03:41 am (UTC)A comment on the series in general: to those of us who don't read French, Sayers' penchant for putting important bits of the text in French with no translation is maddening. Has anyone translated them to English? Some cursory googling didn't turn up anything useful.
If I have to type in pages of stuff with wacky accents just to take a crack at it with http://babelfish.altavista.com I can, but it'll be a while before I have time to do so.
Re: a thought on MMA
Date: 2003-05-19 07:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-05-19 07:06 am (UTC)I am currently too brain-drained to think of anything beyond that...
no subject
Date: 2003-05-19 10:24 am (UTC)Mer
no subject
Date: 2003-05-19 10:53 am (UTC)Which is probably more information than you really needed, but I believe in giving value for money.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-19 10:59 am (UTC)Also, I like people who say twee.
Mer