I hate it when the waffles stick together! Sticking together is what good waffles do!
For all subscribers this week a lovely little grab bag! Spectres, Sylvia, and the Simpsons, mostly, wait and spellings…
I’m still having a play with the format of Unsavory News - several people have pointed out to me that these newsletters could be considerably shorter and lighter touch than they are. I don’t like this idea at all, I like to touch you heavily and at length with an 8 to 10 to 15 minute in-depth read about Vincent Price cooking vichyssoise, or The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, but it would be naive to think that this was sustainable on a weekly basis, what with that job I have, the need to hoover the vast quantities of hair I shed off the floor of my house, and the fact that I’m spending at least two hours a day re-listening to all of Round the Horne at the moment.
So once in a while I’m going to do a true newsletter (rather than a little essay) where I will tell you, briefly, about a few things I’ve found interesting this week. These are the sorts of things which, if I didn’t live alone by the sea but instead lived in a state of domestic bliss with you, I would lean over and direct your attention to in the evenings, or bore you with across the pillow of a morning. So with that in mind…
Look! This is the best description of a cat throwing up I’ve ever read!
James Baldwin said that one of the central joys of reading was that sort of fellow-feeling-across-time sensation you get when you read something resonant…
‘You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone.’
This week I was very pleased to discover that my beloved Sylvia Townsend Warner and I have both seen a cat be sick…
‘Of a sudden, peevish with life, they will turn from their food, exploit their wholesome talent for vomiting, spew up in the end nothing but froth and slime, sit gasping for breath with their blackened gaze fixed on some familiar piece of furniture as though, at long last, they recognised in it the furtive enemy of a lifetime, the unmasked foe.
‘I can be sick whenever I please’ was Minna’s boast. ‘Like a cat, Sophia!’
How good is that?! I’d never thought, or cared, to put it into words before, but that is exactly what cats are like when they vom and the fact that she’s followed it with an unnecessarily hilarious line of dialogue makes it even better. I feel less alone already!
Sylvia thinking about how she’s going to commune with me across time! Not pictured, a cat being sick just out of shot.
That’s Exactly How Dillinger Got Started
Speaking of Sylvia I’m increasingly subject these days to that sort of tonal contagion where, if you read enough of someone, or even speak to someone enough in real life, their style and rhythm starts to creep into your own. I worry that reading so much Sylvia is diluting me and that while she’s made me temporarily defter she has also temporarily made me much less funny (she’s wry - Like a cat, Sophia! - but you wouldn’t subscribe to her newsletter for the lols, you’d subscribe to it for the insanely accurate descriptions of cats being sick). For this reason I’m always careful to watch at least an hour of classic Simpsons every night. It’s the funniest thing that exists, it’s the masterclass, so I take it twice daily to ensure robust comedic health, like you might a multivitamin.
You’d think this would get repetitive but I’m almost constantly noticing new things I admire. I was particularly struck by this on my billionth re-watch of Marge on the Lam.
I really, really enjoy that ‘really?’. Allow me to explain.
Now, you’ll notice a collection of pins beside your work trays, please take four of them and use them to secure the frog in place. Now take your scalpel and with it cut a clean vertical line down the length of your frog - while you’re about it, I’ll dig into this joke.
First, for context, in case you’re some sort of loser that doesn’t have every episode of 90s Simpsons seared into your soul and brain, Homer and Chief Wiggum are in pursuit of Marge and Ruth Powers (who are making a Thelma and Louise style getaway). Marge and Homer have had a minor bust up after he didn’t take her out for the evening (because he thought ballet was a bear driving a little car round and round a circus ring - could do a newsletter on that frankly, but I won’t cause everyone enjoys that bit). Anyway, he cries…
‘She’s become a hardened criminal just because I wouldn’t take her to the ballet!’
And Chief Wiggum says…
‘That’s exactly how Dillinger got started.’
Which is funny, it’s extremely funny to imagine that that would be John Dillinger’s origin story. And there the joke could end, and would end in something that wasn’t as good as The Simpsons. But instead Homer says…
‘Really?’
Which is to say that, in world, Homer recognises that this is an extremely unlikely thing to be true of John Dillinger but of course its not a joke for him, in his reality it’s just an unexpected statement, and he lights up with interest! I’m glad I found the gif - look at that animation. He’s so intrigued! He literally forgets the peril they’re in, and asks for more information!
It’s funny cause it lampshades the first joke, and it gives us a third joke (a ‘screw-the-audience’ in that we then cut away so don’t get to hear any details of John Dillinger’s fascinating, presumably ballet-loving, civilian life). But it’s not the joke layering that I love, it’s the dimensions, and the objectively unnecessary but glorious sense of reality that it gives Homer Simpson. For a second he exists in a real world, as a real person, where he might at any moment find out an interesting new fact about John Dillinger. For my money constantly peppering in little almost bafflingly human touches like this is what raises classic Simpsons from a great animated sit-com to the level of a creative health intervention that I’m mainlining on the daily. It’s perfect stuff!
You may now put your dead frog aside. I regret nothing, dissection is a rewarding learning tool.
Ghost Watch
I just thought you might like to see this photo of me aged 4 assuming my true, and indeed final form.
WooOOooOoOooooooOO! Cute! Look at those chubby spectral hands!
I think it’s very clear that I’m a ghost. I’m a spooky kooky ghost. And I have to applaud my parents for their very low effort, but I presume there was a point in the costuming process, probably after putting the head-bag on, where even they stood back and thought ‘No. No we really are going to have to make this look a lot more like a ghost - Sal, go hastily round the eyes with a dry black marker and draw a wiggly mouth on her otherwise this isn’t an adorable 4 year old, its an accidental hate crime!’
Now, I, like you, noticed that the dinosaur on my trick-or-treating bag seemed to have a distressing amount of human hair, and I googled Darlin’ Dinos so you don’t have to. It was an entire line of aggressively girlish dinosaur dolls with brushable Barbie-style hair coming out of their lizard heads! They made them for exactly two years in the 90s before the world realised they were horrible and shut the company that made them down!
By the way if you want me to text you every time I see a ghost in real life you can become a founding member of this newsletter. I say ‘every time’ but I haven’t seen one yet, or ever in my life, so maybe the pitch is ‘if you want me to text you every month to tell you that I haven’t, yet, seen a ghost, and also there’s no way to stop the texts - then you can become a founding member of this newsletter’. Two people are already in the Ghost Watch club, and their objectively insane financial decision allowed me to buy the keypad I’m currently typing this on - so thanks again Team Ghost Watch! I’m sure we will see one any day now!
A Little Something for the Pedants
Against all the odds Unsavory Typos, our sister publication that catalogues all our typos, is still going strong despite me telling the person in charge of Unsavory Typos that they can and should stop. They consider it a labour of love, which just goes to show the length and breadth of that emotion and the ways in which it manifests. I, for my part, show my love by going back over each newsletter and adding in some typos for them to find.
And there it is for this week! If you’ve enjoyed my light touch playing teasingly over you, please share Unsavory News to help other people to benefit from my touch, or consider becoming a paid subscriber (I’ll leave the touching metaphor at the door here) for £5 a month, or £60 for a whole year of weekly content and access to the dusty and rewarding depths of The Archive! Your contribution helps me to buy things that make it easier to write - like this keypad, and the delicious, rare and expensive cheeses I need to keep my body in ketosis.
For paid subscribers I will be back next week talking about the devil. For unpaid subscribers I will be back in a fortnight talking about… who knows? Maybe the devil again, there’s a lot to him.
Until then
Savory